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LIBRARY 

OF  THE 

University  of  California. 


Class 


71 

i 


BERNARD    SHAW 


ifOB^^ 


agrapli 


ERNARD     SHAW 


„a^!»t-  y/ii^  ,/On^  y^u^  da^Htt/ny. 


Bernard  Shaw 


By 

Holbrook  Jackson 


'  They  haif  said.     What  say  they?    Let  thame  say.' 


With  four  Portraits 


Philadelphia 

G.  W.  Jacobs  &  Co. 

London:  E.  Grant  Richards 

1907 


fl-tf- 


e<-if 


CONTENTS 

I. 

The 

Man     .... 

PAGE 
I 

II. 

The 

Fabian 

•          91 

III. 

The 

Playwright 

.       141 

IV. 

The 

Philosopher 

.       195 

LIST   OF    PORTRAITS 

PAGE 

Bust  by  Rodin — 1906     .         .         .  Frontispiece 

Photograph — 1879 41 

Photograph  by  Frederick  H.  Evans — 1894  141 
Photograph  by  Alvin  Langdon  Coburn — 1904  195 


PREFATORY   LETTER   TO 
A.    R.    ORAGE 

TVyrY  DEAR  ORAGE,— You  will  remem- 
ber  how,  some  years  ago,  we  were 
thrown  together  by  the  Fates  in  that  smoky 
chaos  which  is  known  to  geographers  and 
others  as  Leeds.  I  have  a  clear  recollection 
of  the  exact  circumstances.  It  was  in  a  book- 
shop, into  which  we  had  both  turned,  probably 
to  find  in  books  that  community  of  ideas 
which  we  were  unable  to  find  locally  among 
men.  We  were  pottering  around  some  shelves 
containing  books  of  the  genus  Second-hand, 
which  were  set  far  back  in  the  partial  gloom 
and  comparative  quietness  of  the  remote  end 
of  the  shop.  We  stalked  our  quarry  in  that 
absorbed  and  dilatory  way  peculiar  to  the 
book-hunter.  After  a  while  I  heard  you 
throw  the  intelligence  department  of  the  em- 


Bernard  Shaw 

porium  out  of  gear  by  inquiring  for  a  volume 
by  a  modern  writer,  well  enough  known 
among  thoughtful  people,  but  evidently  a  dark 
continent  to  Leeds.  I  had  been  living  in  the 
town  some  twelve  months,  and  this  was  the 
first  intimation  I  had  received  of  any  one  in 
the  place  being  interested  in  the  writers  who 
interested  me.  The  Leeds  booksellers  seemed 
to  exist  on  theology,  the  Leeds  people  on 
commerce  and  cricket.  I  was  amazed  for  a 
moment.  I  felt  as  one  who  had  stumbled 
accidentally  upon  a  new  planet.  I  made  an 
involuntary  movement  towards  you  ;  my  in- 
stinct, I  remember,  was  as  that  of  one  bent 
upon  catching  hold  of  a  thing  too  good  to  be 
missed. 

Some  days  later  we  were  seated  together  in 
my  house  at  Headingley,  where  you  found  the 
book  to  which  we  owed  our  acquaintance — 
and  many  others  duplicating  in  a  series  of 
pleasant  coincidences  those  on  your  own 
shelves  at  Chapel-Allerton.  For  we  soon 
found  that  intellectually  we  had  been  navi- 
gating the  same  seas  and,  what  is  more,  using 

lO 


Prefatory   Letter 

similar  charts.  We  found  that  we  could  cap 
each  other's  stories,  and  that  we  had  touched 
identical  ports  in  unfamiliar  Archipelagoes. 
Since  then  we  have  sailed  pretty  much  to- 
gether, and  have  been  fortunate  in  speaking 
many  ships,  the  language  of  whose  crews 
answered  familiarly  with  our  own.  And  on 
this  particular  occasion,  as  indeed  on  many 
another,  we  engaged  in  a  mutual  retelling  of 
adventures  in  the  perilous  seas  and  faery  lands 
forlorn  of  the  mind  and  the  imagination.  We 
did  not  find,  however,  that  our  minds  were 
alike,  we  found  rather  that  they  were  akin.  In 
fact,  there  were  gaps  and  differences,  which  I 
am  glad  to  say  exist  even  now,  and  which  I 
am  also  glad  to  say  are  a  continual  source  of 
mutual  concern.  1  rejoice,  moreover,  to  think 
that  our  friendship  has  not  been  engaged  in 
filling  up  these  gaps — it  has  accepted  them  as 
natural  features  ;  but  this  does  not  mean  that 
bridges  have  not  been  thrown  across.  Indeed, 
you  will  remember  how  our  first  meeting  at 
Headingley  was  memorable  in  this  respect,  for 
did  we  not  on  that  occasion  build  a  bridge 

II 


Bernard  Shaw 

from  the  Orient  to  the  Occident  ?  You  left 
behind  you  that  night,  or  rather  the  next 
morning,  for  we  had  talked  the  night  away, 
a  translation  of  the  Bhagavad  Gita  ;  and  you 
carried  under  your  arm  my  copy  of  the  first 
English  version  of  Thus  spake  Zarathustra. 

After  a  while  we  found  others  of  our  kind 
in  Leeds.  We  discovered,  much  to  our  sur- 
prise, that  hidden  in  various  parts  of  the  city, 
for  the  most  part  unknown  to  each  other,  were 
men  and  women  dreaming  similar  dreams  to 
ours  and  thinking  like  thoughts.  Gradually 
we  grew  acquainted,  and  conversations  grew 
into  prolonged  discussions.  We  turned  quiet 
corners  of  local  cafes  into  temporary  forums, 
often  extending  the  lunch-hour  in  a  way  quite 
heretical  in  Yorkshire.  At  these  talks  the 
name  of  Bernard  Shaw  was  often  heard.  We 
were  all  more  or  less  familiar  with  his  point  of 
view,  for  in  many  ways  he  had  been  the  touch- 
stone of  our  acquaintanceship  ;  but  this  does 
not  mean,  as  you  will  remember,  that  we 
accepted  G.B.S.  without  demur.  On  the  con- 
trary, we  did  nothing  of  the  sort,  but  we  at 

12 


Prefatory   Letter 

least  recognised  in  him  the  most  acute  and 
suggestive  mind  in  contemporary  English 
literature.  We  knew  he  was  a  force  to  be 
taken  into  account ;  we  were  unanimous  in  our 
belief  that  only  in  the  vitalised  action  advo- 
cated by  him  was  there  any  hope  for  the 
redemption  of  a  social  system  which  had 
become  a  chaos  and  a  desolation,  as  our 
urban  surroundings  constantly  reminded  us. 
Out  of  these  meetings  was  born  the  Leeds 
Arts  Club,  with  its  contempt  of  pedantic  phil- 
osophy and  academic  art,  and  its  insistence 
upon  the  necessity  of  applying  ideas  to  life. 
You  will  not  have  forgotten  how  you  opened 
our  first  session  with  a  lecture  on  Nietzsche, 
and  how  I  lectured  later  on  Bernard  Shaw. 
We  shall  never  forget  how  our  little  band  of 
members  worked,  and  how  the  Club  flourished  ; 
nor  how  respectable  Leeds  at  first  held  back 
fearing  our  revolutionary  ideas,  and  then 
gradually  came  forward  reassured  by  the  ex- 
cellence of  our  exhibitions  ;  and  how  in  turn 
many  of  these  good  people  joined  the  Club 
and    actually    became    revolutionaries    them- 


Bernard  Shaw 

selves.  Nor  shall  we  forget  how  such  men  as 
Edward  Carpenter,  Gilbert  Chesterton,  Cob- 
den-Sanderson,  and  W.  B.  Yeats  came  long 
distances  to  help  our  cause  ;  and  how  Bernard 
Shaw  left  off  rehearsing  a  play  and  came  down 
from  London  to  give  an  address,  which  set 
Leeds  talking  for  weeks. 

This  was  a  great  event,  for,  as  I  say,  we 
found  in  Bernard  Shaw  what  might  be  called 
a  working  problem,  and  we  two  at  least, 
though  not  quite  clear  upon  every  detail  of 
the  Shavian  philosophy,  marvelled  at  the 
meagre  acceptance  of  Shaw  as  a  leader  of 
thought.  It  was  my  constantly  expressed  irri- 
tation at  the  incapacity  of  the  people  I  met, 
and  those  who  expressed  themselves  in  the 
Press,  to  comprehend  a  writer  who  was  as  clear 
as  day  to  me,  that  prompted  you  one  day  to 
suggest  my  writing  a  Shaw  monograph — and 
here  it  is.  I  took  you  at  your  word,  but  I 
fear  I  took  my  own  time,  for  the  book  should 
have  been  done  at  least  two  years  ago.  But 
many  things  have  happened  in  the  meantime. 
We  have   pitched   our   tents  in  London,  for 

14 


Prefatory  Letter 

instance,  and  our  intellectual  partnership  has 
been  concentrated  in  a  still  more  practical  way 
in  our  co-editorship  of  the  New  Age. 

Among  the  many  problems  raised  by  Ber- 
nard Shaw  there  is  one  that  has  gradually 
been  forced  upon  us  by  the  perpetual  falling 
to  pieces  of  critics  of  all  orders  at  the  instiga- 
tion of  each  new  preface  from  his  pen.  Is  the 
Press  and  public  hopelessly  stupid,  or  is  Shaw 
explaining  himself  into  obscurity  ?  Neither 
you  nor  I  would  wish  him  to  cease  explaining 
himself,  and  there  are  many  with  a  similar 
taste.  But  it  is  quite  evident  that  what  is  on 
the  whole  clear  to  us  is  not  clear  to  a  large 
number  of  apparently  intelligent  and  always 
well-meaning  people.  I  don't  mean  the  man- 
in-the-street  ;  he  does  not  count  in  this  issue  ; 
he  will  always  take  his  Shaw  in  the  snippet 
form  kindly  provided  for  him  by  a  benevolent 
and  discriminating  Press.  I  mean  the  intelli- 
gent person  whose  brain  is  worthy  of  a  better 
cause  ;  the  type  of  mind  that  still  persists  in 
believing  Shaw  a  humorist,  a  trivial  and  en- 
tertaining   dialectician,    or  even,    to    use    the 

15 


Bernard   Shaw 

latest  epithet  of  the  delectable  and  erudite 
dramatic  critic  of  The  Times,  a  naif.  That 
Shaw  is  a  naif  is  no  reason  why  he  should  not 
also  be  a  sound  philosopher.  I  have  never  yet 
been  convinced  that  a  recapitulation  of  the 
obvious  is  inconsistent  with  wisdom  ;  and,  on 
the  other  hand,  ndiveti  is  more  often  than  not 
the  handmaiden  of  all  that  is  delightful  in 
imaginative  work.  Shaw  has  imagination  to 
so  great  an  extent  that  his  philosophic  exposi- 
tions become  imaginative  literature  ;  this  in 
itself  is  so  rare  a  thing  among  philosophers 
that  it  is  enough  to  throw  erudite  persons  out 
of  key.  But  this  does  not  matter,  for  the 
writer  who  makes  essays  with  deference  to 
erudite  and  pedantic  opinion  is  also  out  of 
our  reckoning.  His  work  is  neither  for  all 
time,  nor  yet  for  a  day,  because  it  is  generally 
still-born.  These  people  and  their  works  are 
constitutionally  dull,  and  we,  like  good 
Levites,  pass  by  on  the  other  side.  But  what 
of  those  who  are  not  dull,  who  really  belong 
to  the  modern  movement,  but  are  yet  kept  on 
the  wrong  side  of  the  Bernard  Shaw  depart- 

i6 


Prefatory  Letter 

mcnt  because  of  G.B.S.  ?  Well  it  is  for  such 
that  I  have  written  this  book,  of  which  you 
are  godfather. 

I  have  deliberately  refrained  from  hair- 
splitting or  from  tracking  down  subtleties  of 
thought  to  their  biological  and  metaphysical 
lairs.  This  would  have  defeated  my  purpose 
by  confusing  when  I  wished  to  make  clear. 
I  have  tried  to  link  up  the  main  ideas  which 
go  to  make  the  problem  of  Bernard  Shaw  into 
what  I  hope  you  will  find  a  simple  and  con- 
vincing chain.  All  I  want  now  is  that  readers 
of  my  book  should  not  jump  at  any  foolish 
conclusion  as  to  an  endeavour  on  my  part  to 
"  place  "  Shaw  ;  the  time  is  not  yet  ripe  for 
such  an  effort.  Nor  do  I  wish  them  to  pre- 
pare themselves  for  disappointment  by  antici- 
pating a  detailed  account  of  each  of  his 
separate  works  :  I  am  not  playing  the  part  of 
commentator,  but  of  interpreter.  My  one 
aim  is  to  induce  people  to  refuse  Shaw  on  any 
but  first-hand  terms — to  read  him,  in  short, 
and  not  to  be  content  with  opinions  of  him 
from   other  sources   no    matter   how  exalted. 

17 


Bernard  Shaw 

For  I  think  our  experiences  tally  on  this  point, 
that  the  author  of  Man  and  Superman,  like  the 
author  of  Hamlet,  are  both  more  talked  about 
than  studied,  and  I  am  quite  convinced  that 
as  the  touchstone  to  the  worthiness  of  our 
Leeds  friends  was  their  attitude  towards  the 
former,  so  the  ratio  of  individuals  towards  the 
modern  movement  of  ideas  must  be  gauged 
by  the  intelligence  of  their  attitude  towards 
the  same  person.  If  Bernard  Shaw's  work 
were  merely  unique,  we  could  all  afford  to 
laugh  and  pass  on  ;  but  it  is  a  great  deal  more 
than  that,  it  stands  in  the  same  relation  to 
our  day  as  the  work  of  Swift  did  to  his  day, 
or  Carlyle's  to  his,  and  people  to-day  who  are 
ready  to  admit  the  insufficiency  of  intelligent 
discrimination  then  are  reminded  not  to  repeat 
a  similar  error  in  judgment  now. 

Yours  always, 

HOLBROOK  JACKSON. 

Mill  Hill,  N.W. 


i8 


NOTE 

IKIO  book  is  made  by  one  man  alone^  and  I  wish 
those  who  have  helped  me  in  the  making  of 
this  little  work  to  accept  my  gratitude.  Special 
mention^  however,  must  be  made  of  Mr,  Frederick 
H.  Evans  and  of  Mr.  Alvin  Langdon  Coburny 
whose  ready  permission  to  copy  their  splendid  photo- 
graphs of  Bernard  Shaw  has  given  me  an  opportunity 
of  making  my  book  more  valuable  than  otherwise  it 
would  have  been ;  and  I  must  not  forget  in  this 
reference  M.  August  Rodin,  by  whose  courtesy  the 
frontispiece  of  this  volume  is  a  photograph  of  a 
masterpiece  in  portrait  statuary  ;  and  also  Mrs. 
Bernard  Shaw,  who  helped  me  in  the  choice  of  the 
photographs  and  lent  me  copies  of  her  valuable 
prints.  I  have  to  thank  also  my  friends,  Frederick 
Richardson  for  candid  criticism,  and  A.  R.  Or  age 
for  unwearying  help,  from  the  mutual  discussion  of 

19 


Benediction 

obscure  points  to  the  drudgery  of  ■proof-reading. 
Andy  finally,  I  must  express  my  indebtedness  to  the 
subject  of  this  monograph  himself  for  information 
and  suggestions  of  the  utmost  value,  given  in  that 
spirit  of  generosity  familiar  to  those  who  know  him 
in  private  life. 

H.   J. 


20 


I 

THE    MAN 


Just  consider  my  position.  Do  I  receive  any  spontaneous 
recognition  for  the  prodigies  of  skill  and  industry  I  lavish  on 
an  unworthy  institution  and  a  stupid  public  ?  Not  a  bit  of  it : 
half  my  time  is  spent  in  telling  people  what  a  clever  man  I 
am.  It  is  no  use  merely  doing  clever  things  in  England. 
The  English  do  not  know  what  to  think  until  they  are 
coached,  laboriously  and  insistently  for  years,  in  the  proper 
and  becoming  opinion.  For  ten  years  past,  with  an  unpre- 
cedented pertinacity  and  obstination,  I  have  been  dinning  into 
the  public  head  that  I  am  an  extraordinarily  witty,  brilliant, 
and  clever  man.  That  is  now  part  of  the  public  opinion  of 
England;  and  no  power  in  heaven  or  on  earth  will  ever 
change  it.  I  may  dodder  and  dote ;  I  may  potboil  and 
platitudinise  ;  I  may  become  the  butt  and  chopping-block  of 
all  the  bright,  original  spirits  of  the  rising  generation  ;  but  my 
reputation  shall  not  suffer  ;  it  is  built  up  fast  and  solid,  like 
Shakespear's,  on  an  impregnable  basis  of  dogmatic  reitera- 
tion.— "Valedictory,"  The  Saturday  Reviev,  2  isf  ^lay,  1 898. 


THE    MAN 

^  I  "'HOSE  who  fly  in  the  face  of  public  opinion 
and  devote  themselves  to  the  propaganda 
of  new  ideas  commonly  meet  with  the  same  re- 
ception. It  may,  and  in  fact  does,  vary  from 
age  to  age  in  its  outward  manifestation,  but 
in  essence  its  sameness  is  positively  mono- 
tonous. From  execution  of  the  author,  down 
through  the  steps  of  censorship  and  expurga- 
tion, to  the  civilised  forms  of  abuse,  the 
uniform  purpose  has  been  suppression.  In 
our  own  day,  downright  abuse  has  lost  its 
fashion  in  the  literary  world,  and  is  thoroughly 
at  home  only  on  the  political  platform.  But 
suppression  by  silence  is  still  as  active  and  in- 
effective as  suppression  has  always  been  ;  and, 
strangely  enough,  among  the  very  people  who 

23 


Bernard  Shaw 

loudly  denounce  the  abusive  methods  with 
which,  for  example,  Shelley  was  greeted  by  his 
cultured  contemporaries. 

There  is,  however,  an  exception  in  these 
days  of  an  insatiable  journalism.  If  your  man 
of  new  ideas  can  only  make  himself  entertain- 
ing, and  can  contrive  to  tickle  the  jaded 
palates  of  the  newspaper  readers,  he  may 
rely  upon  being  paragraphed  into  notoriety. 
Editors  will  indeed  wait  upon  him  cap  in 
hand,  and  publish  his  articles  with  something 
like  a  fanfare,  reserving,  however,  to  them- 
selves one  little  right — the  right  to  add  an 
editorial  disclaimer  of  responsibility.  "  Of 
course,"  they  say,  "  So-and-so  is  very  witty 
and  amusing  ;  his  stuff  will  sell ;  only  let  us 
warn  our  readers  that  the  editorial  *  we '  does 
not  take  him  seriously.  He  doesn't  even  take 
himself  seriously." 

This  suppression  by  laughter  is,  in  fact,  the 
reception  accorded  to  George  Bernard  Shaw 
by  most  of  the  English  critics.  As  for  the 
British  public,  what  is  wrong  with  them  Shaw 
has  told  us.     It  "is  what  is  wrong  with  the 

24 


The  Man 

prosaic  men  of  all  countries — stupidity."  In 
England,  Press  and  public  are — prosaic  1 

But  the  case  of  Shaw  does  not  induce  pity. 
There  is  no  immediate  danger  of  his  being 
"snuffed  out  by  an  article."  There  is  even 
much  evidence  of  wilful  provocation  on  his 
part.  He  seems  sometimes  to  stand  aside  after 
throwing  to  his  critics  a  more  than  usually 
irritating  truth,  and  to  watch  with  amusement 
their  attempts  to  deal  with  it.  And  that  very 
attitude  of  his  adds  to  their  irritation. 

Nor  is  it  by  any  means  merely  the  majority 
of  his  readers  who  find  him  difficult  to  appre- 
ciate. The  "  acute  but  honourable  minority  " 
which  men  of  ideas  may  generally  look  to 
command,  is  in  Shaw's  case  placed  often  enough 
in  a  dilemma.  His  greatest  admirers  have 
their  trying  moments,  when  they  hesitate  be- 
tween joining  the  majority  and  swallowing 
a  gibe  directed  unmistakably  against  them- 
selves. For  Shaw  discourages  discipleship  : 
and  his  would-be  disciples  receive  more  chast- 
ening than  indulgence  at  his  hands.  In  this 
respect  he  would  seem  to  say  with  Nietzsche  : 

25 


Bernard   Shaw 

Follow  yourselves  and  you  will  find  me  ; 
follow  me  and  you  will  lose  both  me  and 
yourselves.  This  attitude,  however,  while 
thoroughly  consistent  with  the  rest  of  his 
doctrine,  is  disconcerting  to  human  nature. 
It  appears  like  wilfulness.  It  is  wilfulness. 
And  when  one  remembers  that  wilfulness  has 
been  suppressed  in  most  of  us  from  the  cradle, 
it  is  scarcely  surprising  that  we  should  be 
pained  and  shocked  when  we  find  a  man  who 
has  escaped  this  discipline.  Shaw  is,  in  fact,  an 
enfant  terrible  grown  up.  His  native  wilful- 
ness (to  call  an  excellent  thing  by  a  bad  name) 
is  still  as  fresh  in  him  as  it  was  in  Adam  and 
Eve.  And  the  rest  of  us  are  compelled  to 
detest  it — because  we  envy  it. 

Is  Shaw  serious,  is  he  sincere  ?  Such  ques- 
tions are  naturally  raised  by  the  spectacle  of 
a  mind  that  can  play  with  ideas.  The  English 
mind  finds  thinking  so  very  laborious,  that  it 
naturally  associates  easy  thinking  with  super- 
ficial thinking.  To  be  able  to  think,  and  at 
the  same  time  to  be  witty, — that  is  almost  a 
contradiction  in  terms  for  many  men.      More- 

26 


The  Man 

over,  it  is  so  easy  to  take  the  wit  and  let  the 
thought  go  that  Shaw  was  almost  certain  to  be 
regarded  as  a  wit  first,  and  as  a  thinker  a  long 
way  after.  In  the  same  way,  there  are  still 
people  to  be  found  who  read  Shelley  simply, 
as  they  say,  for  his  poetry.  To  them  Shelley's 
ideas  are  an  unwarrantable  and,  in  any  case, 
a  negligible  superimposition  on  his  poetry.  But 
there  is  a  little  malicious  misrepresentation  as 
well.  <;^he  critics  choose  to  forget  the  serious 
work  Shaw  has  done  in  politics,  economics,  and 
the  like.  Few  men  have  worked  harder  at 
their  ideas  than  Shaw  :  and  if  he  is  witty,  it  is 
not  because  he  is  superficial,  but  because  his 
rare  gift  of  playing  with  ideas  is  the  sign  of 
mastery  long  and  seriously  accomplished; 

It  is  undeniable,  however,  that  Shaw  has  been 
largely  responsible  for  the  misunderstanding. 
Explanations  seldom  really  explain,  and,  as 
Shaw  says,  he  is  nothing  if  not  explanatory. 
His  frank  egotism,  too,  is  bewildering  in  its 
sincerity.  Three  parts  of  all  literature  is,  of 
course,  egotism,  only  egotism  carefully  veiled 
by   the   use   of  the   third   person  ;  but   Shaw 

27 


Bernard   Shaw 

drops  the  veil — he  even  calls  attention  to  the 
fact  that  he  has  dropped  it — and  stands  forth 
nakedly  egotistical  and  still  unashamed.  If 
you  charge  him  with  self-advertisement,  he  is 
not  abashed  ;  on  the  contrary,  he  congratu- 
lates you  on  having  at  last  understood  what  he 
has  told  you.  "  I  am  ashamed,"  he  says, 
"  neither  of  my  work  nor  the  way  it  is  done. 
...  I  like  explaining  its  merits  to  the  huge 
majority  who  don't  know  good  work  from  bad. 
It  does  them  good  ;  and  it  does  me  good, 
curing  me  of  nervousness,  laziness,  and  snob- 
bishness." If  you  call  him  charlatan  he 
promptly  agrees,  adding,  in  one  of  those 
familiar  autobiographical  annotations,  that  he 
first  caught  the  ear  of  the  British  public  on 
a  cart  in  Hyde  Park,  "  not  at  all  as  a  reluctant 
sacrifice  of  my  instincts  of  privacy  to  political 
necessity,  but  because,  like  all  dramatists  and 
mimes  of  genuine  vocation, — I  am  a  natural- 
born  mountebank." 

A  man  who  welcomes  all  the  terms  meant 
opprobriously  and  claims  them  as  his  dis- 
tinguishing   merits,    is     plainly    difficult    to 

28 


The  Man 

understand.  His  very  frankness  and  sincerity 
conceal  him.  But  if  the  charge  of  insincerity 
can  only  be  brought  against  Shaw  by  the 
prosaic,  this  is  even  more  emphatically  true  of 
the  charge  of  negation.  Many  of  those  who 
appreciate  his  ideas  as  well  a:s  his  wit  complain 
at  times  that  Shaw  is  more  destructive  than 
constructive.  The  vast  majority  of  his  readers 
are  positively  surprised  to  hear  that  Shaw  has 
any  constructive  ideas  at  all. 

The  destructive  position  is  practically  forced 
upon  men  of  ideas  who  follow  a  century  like 
the  nineteenth.  It  required  to  be  shown  be- 
yond shadow  of  doubt  that  the  nineteenth- 
century  theories  of  society  were  hopelessly  and 
tragically  wrong.  People  will  not  listen  to 
a  new  theory  of  society  so  long  as  they  believe 
the  old  theory  is  right.  Hence,  the  modern 
reformer  is  of  necessity  an  iconoclast  first 
and  a  builder  afterwards.  But  there  is  plenty 
of  evidence  in  Shaw's  case  at  least  that  icono- 
clasm  is  followed  immediately  by  construction. 
Let  those  who  know  his  books  and  still  doubt 
this  ask  themselves  what  view  of  society  they 

29 


Bernard    Shaw 

gather  from  Shaw's  pages.  Unless  his  readers 
are  singularly  lacking  in  perception,  they  will 
be  able  to  describe  pretty  fully  not  only  the 
form  of  society  which  Shaw  conceives,  but  the 
type  of  men  and  women  whom  he  dreams 
shall  compose  it.  For  Shaw  also  has  his 
visions,  and  dreams  his  dreams  ;  and  behind 
the  pages  of  his  most  destructive  criticism 
judicious  readers  can  descry  the  shining  out- 
lines of  a  Utopia  resplendent  and  glorious  as 
any  that  man  has  imagined. 

Such  domestic  personalia  as  is  necessary  to 
this  work  had  better  be  told,  as  far  as  possible, 
in  Shaw's  own  words.  There  are  two  reasons 
for  this  :  one  the  chance  of  obtaining  a  concise 
picture  of  the  G.B.S.  of  popular  superstition, 
in  the  creation  of  which  Bernard  Shaw  has 
had  no  small  share,  and  from  which  certain 
critical  deductions  may  be  drawn ;  and  secondly 
because  the  personal  notes  scattered  about  his 
prefaces  and  in  the  columns  of  the  Press  are 
among  the  most  piquant  and  characteristic  of 
his  utterances,  and  throw  a  vivid  light  on  the 
peculiarity  of  a  frankly  critical  nature  that  does 

30 


The  Man 

not  shrink  from  turning  the  X-rays  of  its 
analytic  power  upon  itself.  This  should  serve 
as  a  consolation  to  those  who,  while  disliking 
excessive  frankness,  make  a  god  of  con- 
sistency. 

He  was  born  in  Dublin  on  26  July,  1856. 
He  was  the  third  and  last  child,  and  only  son 
of  George  Carr  Shaw,  of  Dublin,  for  many 
years  an  old-style  civil  servant,  who  retired 
on  a  pension,  which  he  sold,  afterwards  going 
into  business  as  a  merchant  and  mill-owner. 
The  enterprise,  however,  was  only  moderately 
successful,  owing  to  limitations  of  capital  and 
failure  to  cope  with  changing  commercial  con- 
ditions. The  family  was  a  middle-class  one, 
with  all  the  prejudices  and  habits  of  that  class. 
"  They  talked  of  *  the  Shaws '  as  of  the  Hohen- 
zollerns  or  Romanoffs,"  says  their  famous  de- 
scendant, but  their  circumstances  must  have 
always  bordered  on  the  impecunious.  "  My 
father,"  he  says,  "was  an  ineffective,  unsuccess- 
ful man,  in  theory  a  vehement  teetotaller,  but 
in  practice  often  a  furtive  drinker.  He  might 
have  been  a  weaker  brother  of  Charles  Lamb." 


31 


Bernard  Shaw 

While  inheriting  none  of  his  father's  inefFectu- 
ality,  G.B.S.  must  have  received  some  legacy  of 
humour  from  that  "  weaker  brother  of  Charles 
Lamb,"  for  we  have  an  anecdote,  simple  enough 
in  its  way,  but  illustrating  just  that  self- 
conscious  humour  expressed  in  impulsive  anti- 
climax which  the  son  has  turned  into  a  literary 
weapon  of  phenomenal  power.  "  When  I  was 
a  child,"  G.B.S.  tells  us,  *'  my  father  gave  me 
my  first  dip  in  the  sea  in  Kelliney  Bay.  He 
prefaced  it  by  a  very  serious  exhortation  on 
the  importance  of  learning  to  swim,  culmina- 
ting in  these  words  :  *  When  I  was  a  boy  of 
only  fourteen,  my  knowledge  of  swimming 
enabled  me  to  save  your  uncle  Robert's  life.* 
Then,  seeing  I  was  deeply  impressed,  he 
stooped,  and  added  confidentially  in  my  ear, 
'And  to  tell  you  the  truth,  1  never  was  so 
sorry  for  anything  in  my  life  afterwards.'  He 
then  plunged  into  the  ocean,  enjoyed  a 
thoroughly  refreshing  swim,  and  chuckled  all 
the  way  home." 

His  mother,  who  was  twenty  years  younger 
than    her    husband,   and    who    is    still    living 

32 


The  Man 

("and  much  younger  than  her  children,"  says 
her  son),  was  Lucinda  Elizabeth  Gurly,  the 
daughter  of  Walter  Bagnal  Gurly,  a  country 
gentleman  of  Carlow,  whose  estate  G.B.S.  in- 
herited, and  made  solvent  out  of  his  literary 
earnings,  on  his  maternal  uncle's  death.  She 
evidently  supplied  whatever  capability  there 
was  in  the  home.  She  must  have  possessed 
the  determination  of  purpose  which  the  father 
lacked  ;  but  she  was  not  a  domestic  genius. 
Her  tastes  were  an  anticipation  of  those  of  the 
comparatively  freer  woman  of  to-day.  She 
was  self-centred  and  humane,  with  a  complete 
indifference  to  public  opinion,  which  her  son 
has  certainly  inherited.  In  fact,  Bernard  Shaw 
takes  his  most  definite  characteristics  from 
his  mother.  Her  independence,  her  taste  in 
music,  her  unromantic  attitude  towards  life, 
and  above  all,  her  energy  and  perseverance, 
and  that  manner  of  dealing  with  prejudices 
by  walking  straight  through  them  as  if  they 
were  not  there,  are  the  obvious  sources  of 
similar  features  in  the  genius  of  the  son. 
She    threw   all    her   energy    into    music,   and 

33 


Bernard   Shaw 

achieved  a  distinction  as  an  amateur  singer 
and  as  the  indefatigable  lieutenant  of  an  ener- 
getic organiser  of  concerts,  oratorios,  and  even 
operas  in  Dublin,  which  qualified  her  in  later 
life  to  earn  her  own  living  and  her  son's  as  a 
teacher  of  singing  and  a  trainer  of  choirs  in 
London.  She  came  to  London  ostensibly  to 
help  her  daughter  into  the  profession  of  music 
as  a  singer,  but  remained  as  a  teacher  of  sing- 
ing first,  and  later  as  a  conductor  of  girls' 
choirs  in  public  schools,  a  work  she  continued 
until  she  was  over  seventy.  "Even  then," 
Shaw  says,  "retirement  was  not  easy,  as  she 
retained  both  her  vigor  and  her  voice." 

Mr.  James  Huneker,  the  clever  American 
journalist,  author  of  Iconoclasts:  A  Boo]^  of 
Dramatists^  has  been  persuasively  and  em- 
phatically reproved  by  Shaw  for  making  him  a 
kind  of  Log  Cabin  to  White  House  hero 
who  "  got  on "  by  sheer  devotion  to  the 
romantic  duties  of  that  exalted  aim  ;  and  in 
the  preface  to  The  Irrational  Knot  there  is  a  fine 
tribute  to  the  mother  who  contributed  her 
energy  towards  finding  the  means  of  subsist- 

34 


The  Man 

ence  while  the  son  followed  the  path  he  had 
chosen.  "  I  was  an  able-bodied  and  able- 
minded  young  man  in  the  strength  of  my 
youth,"  says  this  candid  son,  "  and  my  family, 
then  heavily  embarrassed,  needed  my  help 
urgently.  That  I  should  have  chosen  to  be  a 
burden  to  them  instead  was,  according  to  all 
the  conventions  of  peasant  lad  fiction,  mon- 
strous. Well,  without  a  blush  I  embraced  the 
monstrosity.  I  did  not  throw  myself  into  the 
struggle  for  life  :  I  threw  my  mother  into  it. 
I  was  not  a  staff  to  my  father's  old  age  :  1 
hung  on  to  his  coat-tails."  He  describes  his 
mother  "drudging  in  her  elder  years  at  the 
art  of  music  "  for  him,  and  is  ready  to  recog- 
nise this  as  frankly  as  he  recognises  the  de- 
pendence of  the  Rev.  James  Mavor  Morrell 
on  Candida.  But  Mrs.  Shaw  was  obviously 
no  Candida.  The  son  of  Candida  would  have 
enjoyed  very  little  freedom,  however  well 
mothered  he  might  have  been.  Mrs.  Shaw 
went  her  own  way  and  allowed  her  son  to  go 
his.  They  suited  one  another  well  in  this 
respect.      Mrs.   Clandon,  in   Tou   Never   Cart 

35 


Bernard   Shaw 

Telly  shows  how  well  the  author  knows  the 
thoroughly  humane,  able 'woman  whose  in- 
terests lie  outside  the  home,  and  who  is  incom- 
moded by  displays  of  family  sentiment.  There 
was  probably  a  good  deal  of  Mrs.  Clandon, 
and  certainly  nothing  of  Candida,  in  Mrs. 
Shaw.  And  there  is  a  good  deal  of  Mrs.  Shaw 
in  her  son.  That  is  why  he  will  not  suffer 
"James  Huneker  or  any  romanticist  to  pass 
him  off"  as  a  peasant  boy  qualifying  for  a 
chapter  in  Smiles'  Self-Help,  or  a  good  son  sup- 
porting a  helpless  mother,  instead  of  a  "  stu- 
pendously selfish  artist  leaning  with  the  full 
weight  of  his  hungry  body  on  an  energetic 
and  capable  woman." 

Of  Bernard  Shaw's  two  sisters,  one,  named 
Agnes,  died  in  1876,  just  as  she  came  of  age  ; 
the  other,  Miss  Lucy  Carr  Shaw,  the  cause  of 
her  mother's  coming  to  London,  became  a 
professional  singer,  and  now  lives  in  retire- 
ment in  Germany.  She  has  made  some  excur- 
sions into  print,  her  best-known  work  in  this 
sphere  being  a  series  of  excellent  letters  on 
the    education   of  a  girl,    recently   published 

36 


OF  THt 

-^The  Man 


under  the   title,  Five  Letters  of  the  House  of 
Kildonnel. 

As  to  Shaw's  education  and  early  training, 
the  ensuing  results  have  proved  them  fortunate 
to  the  curve  of  growth  which  nature  meant 
him  to  follow,  for  of  education  in  the  usual 
sense  of  the  word  he  had  little,  and  therefore 
little  to  unlearn.  "  I  never  learnt  anything  at 
school,"  he  says,  "a  place  where  they  put 
Caesar  and  Horace  into  the  hands  of  small  boys, 
and  expected  the  result  to  be  an  elegant  taste 
and  knowledge  of  the  world.  I  took  refuge 
in  total  idleness  at  school,  and  picked  up  at 
home,  quite  unconsciously,  a  knowledge  of 
that  extraordinary  literature  of  modern  music, 
from  Bach  to  Wagner,  which  has  saved  me 
from  being  at  the  smallest  disadvantage 
in  competition  with  men  who  only  know 
the  grammar  and  mispronunciation  of  the 
Greek  and  Latin  poets  and  philosophers. 
For  the  rest,  my  parents  went  their  own 
way  and  let  me  go  mine.  Thus  the  habit 
of  freedom,  which  most  Englishmen  and 
Englishwomen  of  my  class  never  acquire  and 

^  37 


Bernard   Shaw 

never  let  their  children  acquire,  came  to  me 
naturally." 

When  quite  a  small  boy  a  clerical  uncle,  the 
Rev.  William  George  Carroll,  Vicar  of  St. 
Bride's,  Dublin,  who,  it  is  interesting  to  note, 
was  the  first  Protestant  parson  in  Ireland  to 
declare  for  Home  Rule,  taught  him  some 
Latin  grammar.  Afterwards  he  was  sent  to 
the  Wesleyan  Connexional  School,  now  known 
as  Wesley  College,  in  Stephen's  Green.  In 
Ireland  the  Protestant  does  not  draw  the  same 
distinction  between  Nonconformist  and  Estab- 
lished Churches  as  in  England.  There  the 
distinction  is  the  broad  one  between  Protest- 
antism and  Roman  Catholicism,  and  that  is 
how  it  was  possible  for  the  young  Bernard 
Shaw  to  find  himself  under  the  tuition  of 
Wesleyans.  In  reference  to  this  matter  he 
says,  "  I  was  sent,  with  many  boys  of  my  own 
denomination,  to  a  Wesleyan  school,  where 
the  Wesleyan  catechism  was  taught  without 
the  least  protest  on  the  part  of  the  parents, 
although  there  was  so  little  presumption  in 
favour  of  any  boy  there   being  a  Wesleyan, 

38 


The  Man 

that  if  all  the  Church  boys  had  been  with- 
drawn at  any  moment  the  school  would  have 
become  bankrupt."  But  although  of  Pro- 
testant family,  Shaw  was  never  confirmed  a 
member  of  the  Church,  and  there  was  nearly 
a  hitch  in  his  baptism,  for  the  appointed  god- 
father failed  to  appear  at  the  font,  and  his  re- 
sponsibilities had  to  be  somewhat  hurriedly 
assumed  by  the  sexton. 

He  remained  at  the  Wesleyan  Connexional 
School  for  several  years,  where  he  learnt  so 
little  that  on  being  examined  by  the  uncle  who 
previously  had  taught  him  Latin,  his  ignorance 
of  the  usual  scholastic  knowledge  was  made 
apparent.  But  he  knew  something  of  more 
value  :  he  had  acquired  the  beginnings  of 
that  deep  knowledge  of  literature,  music,  and 
painting,  which  has  been  of  such  use  to  him 
ever  since  ;  and  he  would  have  known  much 
more  even  at  this  early  age  had  his  own  in- 
clinations been  consulted,  and  his  education 
not  "interrupted  by  schooling."  After  this 
experience  he  says  :  "  I  was  experimented  on 
desultorily   in   a   few   other    schools,   but  the 

39 


Bernard  Shaw 

result  was  the  same — I  learnt  nothing  ;  and 
the  value  received  by  my  parents  for  their 
expenditure  was  simply  the  getting  me  out 
of  the  way  for  half  the  day.  I  was  always  a 
day  boy,  and  had  no  experience  of  boarding 
schools.  At  the  Wesleyan  Connexional  it  was 
a  point  of  honour  for  the  boarders  and  day 
boys  to  despise  one  another.  We  called  each 
other  *the  skinnies/  the  implication  being  that 
we  were  inadequately  fed  at  school,  or  in  the 
home,  as  the  case  might  be.  1  was  tolerated 
in  school  solely  as  a  source  of  income  to  the 
establishment.  In  an  uncommercial  system 
of  education  I  should  have  been  thrown  into 
the  street  as  an  unemployable.  I  was  an  un- 
mitigated nuisance  until  the  phenomenon  de- 
scribed in  the  first  act  of  Man  and  Superman  as 
the  dawning  of  the  moral  passion  took  place  ; 
and  by  that  time  I  was  nearing  the  end  of  my 
schooldays,  which  I  look  back  on  as  the  most 
completely  wasted  and  mischievous  part  of  my 
life." 

The  inclination  to  write  was  never  a  con- 
suming desire.     At  the  same  time,  when  he 

40 


ISKRXAKI)    SIIAW 

US79 


The  Man 

was  a  small  boy  he  "  concocted  a  short  story 
and  sent  it  to  some  boys'  journal,"  but  the 
definite  wish  to  write  was  never  present,  "  any 
more  than  I  ever  felt  inclined  to  breathe." 
He  wished  to  draw,  and  Michelangelo  was  his 
boyish  ideal.  When  he  had  grown  out  of  the 
"  earlier  impulse  towards  piracy  and  highway 
robbery  "  he  inclined  towards  a  wicked  bari- 
tone in  an  opera.  Summing  the  matter  up  he 
says,  "  No,  I  never  wanted  to  write.  I  know, 
of  course,  the  value  and  the  scarcity  of  the 
literary  faculty  (though  I  think  it  overrated), 
but  I  still  don't  want  it "  ;  adding  in  sly  anti- 
climax, "  You  cannot  want  a  thing  and  have 
it  too."  So  what  came  by  nature  grew  by  the 
help  of  indomitable  perseverance  and  untiring 
energy. 

This  literary  energy  which  usually  produces 
early  works,  he  assures  us,  was  worked  off  in 
the  correspondence  of  a  romantic  friendship 
with  Edward  McNulty,  a  schoolfellow,  who 
afterwards  wrote  the  Irish  novels  Misther 
O'Ryan  and  The  Son  of  a  Peasant.  This  corre- 
spondence,   which    one    may    be    excused   for 

41 


Bernard  Shaw 

hoping  the  Fates  have  preserved,  covered  the 
ages  from  fifteen  to  twenty,  when  the  occasion 
of  the  visit  of  the  American  evangelists. 
Moody  and  Sankey,  to  Dublin,  where  Shaw, 
then  a  clerk,  was  employed  in  Irish  land 
agency  (of  all  employments  for  a  future 
revolutionist !),  caused  his  first  appearance  in 
print.  "  I  went  to  hear  them,"  he  says.  "  I 
was  wholly  unmoved  by  their  eloquence,  and 
felt  bound  to  inform  the  public  that  I  was,  on 
the  whole,  an  atheist.  My  letter  was  solemnly 
printed  in  Public  Opinion,  to  the  extreme 
horror  of  my  numerous  uncles." 

This  early  publicity  in  the  form  of  a  letter 
to  the  editor  of  a  journal  is  strictly  in  keep- 
ing with  the  ensuing  order  of  things,  and  this 
literary  and  propagandist  predilection  is  one 
of  his  most  persistent  characteristics.  But 
the  incident  of  Moody  and  Sankey  and  Public 
Opinion  was  not  the  first  offence,  for  there  was 
imminent  peril  of  the  tradition  being  estab- 
lished some  years  before,  and  it  was  presum- 
ably only  the  fact  of  the  peculiar  wit  which 
we  know   to-day  being  born  out   of  its  due 

42 


The  Man 

time  that  prevented  its  baptism  of  print  as 
early  as  the  year  1871.  For  in  the  Vaudeville 
Magazine^  which  described  itself  as  "a  Monthly 
Journal  of  Fact,  Fiction,  Fun,  and  Fancy," 
and  which  was  evidently  beloved  of  the  gods, 
for  it  died  at  the  tender  age  of  six  months, 
there  occurs  the  following  among  the  Editorial 
Replies,  under  date  September,  1871,  G.  B. 
Shaw  (Torca  Cottage,  Torca  Hill,  Dalkey,  Co. 
Dublin,  Ireland)  :  '*  You  should  have  regis- 
tered your  letter  ;  such  a  combination  of  wit 
and  satire  ought  not  to  have  been  conveyed  at 
the  ordinary  rate  of  postage.  As  it  was,  your 
arguments  were  so  weighty  we  had  to  pay  two 
pence  extra  for  them."  Here,  probably,  is  the 
earliest  public  reference  to  that  diablerie  which 
has  become  a  common  object  of  the  Press,  and 
the  editor  of  1871  was  evidently  as  bewildered 
as  so  many  editors  and  others  have  been  since. 
He  left  school  at  the  age  of  fourteen,  and 
from  the  age  of  fifteen  to  twenty  he  did  or- 
dinary office  work.  He  entered  the  office  of 
Mr.  Charles  Uniacke  Townshend,  of  Dublin, 
with   the   object  of  learning   the   business   of 

43 


Bernard  Shaw 

land  agency,  and  remained  there  for  some  five 
years.  He  must  have  shown  skill  in  his  work, 
for  when  he  was  sixteen  a  position  of  trust 
occupied  by  a  man  of  responsible  years  in  the 
office  suddenly  became  vacant,  and  to  meet  the 
emergency  Shaw  was  thrust  into  the  post  for 
a  day  and  held  it  for  four  years,  when  he 
"simply  jumped  overboard"  by  resigning 
his  appointment  and  throwing  himself  on  his 
mother's  hands  in  settling  in  London  in  1876. 
Here  is  his  own  characteristic  description  of 
this  event  and  its  subsequent  result.  "At  the 
age  of  sixteen  I  was  thrust  on  an  emergency 
into  a  grown  man's  post  which  was  the  most 
responsible,  both  as  to  money  and  other 
matters,  in  the  whole  office  ;  and  not  all  my 
distaste  for  it,  nor  my  utter  want  of  interest 
in  and  consequently  comprehension  of  the 
business,  availed  to  displace  me  afterwards. 
One  of  the  remorses  of  my  life  is  for  my 
ridiculous  anger  with  my  father  because  he, 
poor  man,  with  a  view  to  helping  me  to  com- 
mercial employment  in  London  (which  I 
specially  dreaded  finding),  went  to  Mr.  Town- 

44 


The  Man 

shend  and  obtained  from  him  a  testimonial 
in  such  handsome  terms  that  any  one  reading 
it  would  have  supposed  that  I  was  born  to  be 
cashier  of  the  Bank  of  England."  But  he 
did  not  give  up  the  habit  of  looking  to 
an  office  for  employment  until  1879.  He 
would  not  have  it  supposed  that  because  he 
is  a  man  of  letters  he  never  tried  to  earn 
an  honest  living.  "  I  began,"  he  says,  "  to 
commit  that  sin  against  my  nature  when  I 
was  fifteen,  and  persevered,  from  youthful 
timidity  and  diffidence,  until  I  was  twenty- 
three.  My  last  attempt  was  in  1879,  when  a 
company  was  formed  in  London  to  exploit  an 
ingenious  invention  by  Mr.  Thomas  Alva 
Edison — a  much  too  ingenious  invention,  as  it 
proved,  being  nothing  less  than  a  telephone  of 
such  stentorian  efficiency  that  it  bellowed  your 
most  private  communications  all  over  the 
house  instead  of  whispering  them  with  some 
sort  of  discretion."  In  what  capacity  the 
future  author  of  Man  and  Superman  served  this 
concern  does  not  transpire  from  his  own  con- 
fession, but  it  appears  that  from  the  accident 

45 


Bernard   Shaw 

of  his  possessing  some  knowledge  of  physics 
and  chemistry,  and  thereby  of  being  the  only 
member  of  the  establishment  who  could  give 
"  the  current  scientific  explanation  of  tele- 
phony," he  often  found  himself  discharging 
the  duties  of  official  lecturer  to  the  company 
in  place  of  the  gentleman  who  was  specifically 
engaged  for  that  purpose,  but  "whose  strong 
point  was  pre-scientific  agriculture."  He  is 
persuaded  thereby  that  he  laid  the  foundation 
of  Mr.  Edison's  London  reputation.  In  these 
early  experiences  as  a  lecturer  he  was  often 
amused  at  the  half-concealed  incredulity  of  the 
visitors  as  to  the  veracity  of  his  exposition  of 
the  wonders  of  telephony  as  exemplified  in  the 
company's  instrument — an  incredulity  that 
seems  to  have  dogged  his  audiences  down  to 
to-day.  This  was  coupled  with  obvious  un- 
certainty as  to  whether  they  ought  or  ought 
not  to  tip  the  lecturer,  "  a  question,"  he  adds, 
"  they  either  decided  in  the  negative  or  never 
decided  at  all  ;  for  I  never  got  anything." 

After   this   commercial  experience  "all   at- 
tempts to  earn  an  honest  living  "  lapsed  ;  and 

46 


The  Man 

a  period  of  utter  failure  to  obtain  any  sort  of 
encouragement,  recognition,  or  literary  employ- 
ment followed,  and  lasted  until  1885.  His 
fortunes  during  this  period  were  at  their  lowest 
point  ;  and  when,  in  1 881,  an  attack  of  small- 
pox left  him  "  unmarked,  but  an  anti-vaccina- 
tionist  for  life,"  his  affairs  seemed  desperate  ; 
for  the  repeated  refusals  of  publishers  and 
editors  to  touch  his  work  seemed  to  stamp  him 
as  a  hopeless  failure  in  journalism  and  litera- 
ture ;  and  his  perseverance  in  the  face  of  the 
straitened  resources  of  his  family  had  all  the 
air  of  infatuated  and  heartless  selfishness.  He 
was  not  sustained  even  by  belief  in  himself ; 
for,  as  he  declares,  "  I  was  profoundly  unsatis- 
fied with  what  I  produced,  and  worked  by 
mere  instinct,  like  a  beaver." 

This  is  the  period  of  which  he  treated 
later  when  he  wrote  that,  "when  nobody 
would  pay  a  farthing  for  a  stroke  of  my  pen," 
he  managed  to  mix  with  people  who  spent  at 
least  as  much  in  a  week  as  he  did  in  a  year. 
The  reason  was  to  be  found  in  the  fact  that  he 
had  the  ability,  through  the  accidental  lack  of 

47 


Bernard   Shaw 

better  knowledge,  to  "  play  a  simple  pianoforte 
accompaniment  at  sight  more  congenially  to 
a  singer  than  most  amateurs  "  ;  thereby  gain- 
ing glimpses  of  a  sphere  of  social  life  other- 
wise unattainable. 

In  a  recent  reflection  on  this  impecunious 
period  he  says  :  "  I  was  poor  and  (by  day) 
shabby.  I  stood  for  my  self-respect  on  the 
things  I  had  :  probity,  ability,  knowledge  of 
art,  laboriousness,  and  whatever  else  came 
cheaply  to  me.  I  could  walk  into  Hampton 
Court  Palace  and  the  National  Gallery  (on 
free  days)  and  enjoy  Mantegna  and  Michel- 
angelo, whilst  millionaires  were  yawning 
miserably  over  inept  gluttonies  ;  1  could  suffer 
more  by  hearing  a  movement  of  Beethoven's 
Ninth  Symphony  taken  at  a  wrong  tempo  than 
a  duchess  by  losing  a  diamond  necklace." 

His  literary  career  did  not  properly  begin 
until  nine  years  after  his  first  arrival  in 
London,  when,  in  1885,  it  was  practically 
inaugurated  by  Mr.  William  Archer,  who  was 
instrumental  in  his  being  appointed  to  the 
reviewing  staff  of  the  Pall  Mall  Gazette^  under 

48 


The  Man 

W.  T.  Stead  ;  and  the  same  friend  shortly 
afterwards  helped  him  to  the  post  of  art  critic 
to  The  WorJd^  under  Edmund  Yates.  From 
that  time  he  earned  his  living  by  his  pen. 
The  previous  nine  years,  however,  were  not 
entirely  devoid  of  recognition,  as  his  own  record 
of  what  he  calls  "  three  successes,"  in  a  letter 
to  the  present  writer,  will  show.  "Ernest 
Radford's  brother  George  (the  County  Coun- 
cillor) got  me  five  pounds  for  writing  an 
article  for  one  of  his  clients  about  patent 
medicines — I  suppose  it  was  wanted  for  an 
advertisement  of  some  sort,  and  have  not  the 
least  idea  what  became  of  it.  G.  R.  Sims 
accepted  an  article  for  a  paper  he  started  called 
One  and  AIL  I  think  it  was  about  Christian 
names  ;  and  the  price  was  fifteen  shillings. 
And  a  fellow-lodger  of  mine  procured  me  the 
sum  of  five  shillings  for  some  verses  to  be 
appended  to  an  engraving  which  some  pub- 
lisher had  bought.  1  wrote  them  as  a  bur- 
lesque, and  was  so  conscience-stricken  when 
he  took  them  seriously  and  paid  for  them, 
that    1    wrote    him    some    serious    verses    for 


Bernard  Shaw 

another  picture.  They  so  disappointed  him 
that  he  dropped  me  at  once,  and  my  career 
as  a  poet  came  to  an  end." 

What  pulled  him  through  the  period  of 
apparent  failure  was  dogged  hard  labour  with 
his  pen.  From  1879  to  1883  he  produced 
five  novels.  The  story  of  these  unfortunate 
works  has  been  recounted  in  an  inimitable  way 
in  the  preface  to  Cashel  Byron's  Profession.  "  I 
recall  these  five  remote  products  of  my 
nonage,"  he  writes,  "  as  five  heavy  brown-paper 
parcels,  which  were  always  coming  back  to  me 
from  some  publisher,  and  raising  the  very 
serious  financial  question  of  the  sixpence  to  be 
paid  to  Messrs.  Carter,  Paterson,  &  Co.,  the 
carriers,  for  passing  them  on  to  the  next 
publisher."  There  being  no  publishers  at  that 
time  adventurous  enough  to  issue  these  re- 
markable fictions,  their  author  turned  to  other 
literary  labours.  Despised  and  rejected  of 
publishers,  the  novels  eventually  became  the 
incidentals  of  the  literary  output  of  a  militant 
socialist. 

The    five    novels   of  his    "  nonage "    were 

50 


The  Man 

respectively  entitled,  No.  i,  Immaturity  (i  879) ; 
No.  2,  The  Irrational  Knot  (1880);  No.  3, 
Love  Among  the  Artists  (1881,  interrupted  by 
the  small-pox  attack)  ;  No.  4,  Cashel  Byron  s 
Profession  (1882);  and  No.  5,  t/f«  Unsocial 
Socialist  (1883).  Nos.  4  and  5  first  sought  a 
public  in  the  pages  of  the  now  extinct  Socialist 
magazine  To-Day,  and  later  on  No.  4,  Cashel 
Byrons  Profession  (it  was  printed  from  the 
stereotyped  plates  of  To-Day)^  became  his  first 
separately  published  volume.  This  "  mis- 
shapen shilling  edition  "  was  well  reviewed  by 
Mr.  William  Archer  and  Mr.  John  M.  Robert- 
son, and  it  also  won  the  admiration  of  Steven- 
son. W.  E.  Henley  wanted  to  have  it  drama- 
tised. The  Saturday  Review  declared  it  "  the 
novel  of  the  age."  Following  such  an  exalted 
cue,  "  the  other  papers  hastily  searched  their 
waste-paper  baskets  for  it  and  reviewed  it, 
mostly  rather  disappointedly  ;  and  the  public 
preserved  its  composure  and  did  not  seem  to 
care."  A  revised  shilling  edition  was  placed 
on  the  market  by  Messrs.  Walter  Scott, 
and  in  1901  the  adventures  of  Cashel  Byron's 

51 


Bernard   Shaw 

Profession  assumed  finality  in  the  prefaced  and 
appendiced  edition  issued  by  Mr.  Grant 
Richards,  to  which  was  added  a  dramatised 
version  in  blank  verse  entitled  The  Admirable 
Bashvilky  or  Constancy  Unrezvarded. 

The  publication  of  No.  5  brought  its  author 
at  least  one  asset  This  was  the  acquaintance 
of  William  Morris,  who,  to  the  author's  sur- 
prise, "  had  been  reading  the  monthly  instal- 
ments with  a  certain  relish."  Nos.  2  and  3 
saw  the  light  in  another  propagandist  maga- 
zine. Our  Comer,  owned  and  edited  by  Mrs. 
Annie  Besant.  This  excellent  little  monthly 
flourished  in  the  year  1886,  and  had  for  con- 
tributors Charles  Bradlaugh,  John  M.  Robert- 
son, Hypatia  Bradlaugh  Bonner,  as  well  as 
Mrs.  Besant  and  George  Bernard  Shaw,  who, 
besides  his  novels,  contributed  the  monthly 
article  on  Art.  Here  is  his  own  description  of 
the  circumstances  connected  with  the  publica- 
tion of  novels  No.  2  and  No.  3  : — 

"  On  the  passing-  of  To-Day,  I  became 
novelist  in  ordinary  to  a  magazine  called  Our 

52 


The  Man 

Corner,  edited  by  Mrs.  Annie  Besant.  It  had 
the  singular  habit  of  paying  for  its  contribu- 
tions, and  was,  I  am  afraid,  to  some  extent  a 
device  of  Mrs.  Besant's  for  relieving  neces- 
sitous young  propagandists  without  wounding 
their  pride  by  open  almsgiving.  She  was  an 
incorrigible  benefactress,  and  probably  re- 
venged herself  for  my  freely  expressed  scorn 
for  this  weakness  by  drawing  on  her  private 
account  to  pay  for  my  jejune  novels.  At  last 
Our  Corner  went  the  way  of  all  propagandist 
magazines,  completing  a  second  nonage  novel 
and  its  own  career  at  the  same  moment.  This 
left  me  with  only  one  unprinted  masterpiece, 
my  Opus  I,  which  had  cost  me  an  unconscion- 
able quantity  of  paper,  and  was  called,  with 
merciless  fitness,  *  Immaturity.'  Part  of  it 
had  by  this  time  been  devoured  by  mice, 
though  even  they  had  not  been  able  to  finish  it. 
To  this  day  it  has  never  escaped  from  its  old 
brown-paper  travelling  suit." 

T he  Irrational  Knot  Yi?iS  reissued  in  1905  with 
a  preface.  These  recent  reissues  have  been 
partially  of  a  protective  nature,  for  some  of 

53 


Bernard  Shaw 


m  Aiaerrca.  *  The  aonds 
9»faB^iB&&r  (dead.  iai.  d&e  ^odont-^is^  jsagft- 
laaes  af  Ag  e^^ttaes»  feppe  «ise»:  lad  Kgium  tp 

■LJ>  wnaM  tt  t&g  rarg  of  a.  ddfar  SMi  &  kiiFper 
unpipt^  tree  at  sEL  tut^Ht  to  lihcKiltaaQii  ainHL. 

of  X.  waefist  m  fitaatfaBe.     Pirsr  there  is  dae 
of  2701111^  mt^id^ 

TD  say  iwitfMiig  cf  liKiT 

ICC  ^'1  ■w*;^  host  ia.   ajjwte   or    iz-st 

.    «I«astefaik«BrM&it  a  book  is 
a^fl[^*ke  s^s;  *kis  easier  -i  :-jir   t 


54 


Tbc  Man 


)mm»lha 


iS 


Bernard  Shaw 

on  Liberty.  Among  the  members  of  the 
Zeletical  Society  were  Mr.  Sydney  Webb, 
Mr.  Emil  Garcke,  and  Mr.  J.  G.  Godard. 
The  friendship  with  Mr.  Webb,  which  began 
in  this  way,  proved  lasting  and  fruitful. 
"  Sydney  Webb,"  he  has  said,  "  was  of  more 
use  to  me  than  any  other  man  I  ever  met,  and 
will  be  of  more  use  to  England  than  any 
other  man  of  his  time."  Shaw's  first  attempts 
as  a  speaker  were  so  nervous  and  wretched, 
according  to  his  own  account,  that  he  resolved 
to  make  a  speech  in  public  every  week  for  a 
year  ;  and  it  was  in  this  way  that  he  acquired 
the  habit  of  haunting  public  meetings,  which 
led  to  his  hearing  Henry  George  speak  on  the 
15th  December,  1882,  at  the  Memorial  Hall 
in  Farringdon  Street.  George  set  him  study- 
ing economics  for  the  first  time  ;  and  Karl 
Marx's  Capital  completed  his  conversion  to 
Socialism.  By  that  time  he  had,  by  practice 
and  perseverance,  become  a  presentable  speaker 
and  debater.  He  was  one  of  the  early  mem- 
bers of  the  Fabian  Society,  which  he  joined  in 
September,    1884.     He   was    elected   to    the 

56 


The  Man 

Society's  Executive  Committee  in  the  follow- 
ing December,  and  has  served  on  that  body 
ever  since. 

His  activity  and  energy  at  this  time 
amount  almost  to  genius.  He  helped  to 
found  and  keep  going  the  Hampstead  Historic 
Club,  a  private  circle  of  students  of  Marx 
and  Proudhon,  which  eventually  became  the 
British  Economic  Association.  He  lectured 
and  debated  here,  there,  and  everywhere, 
becoming  by  sheer  hard  work  and  multiplicity 
of  experience  not  only  an  accomplished  public 
speaker,  both  indoor  and  open-air,  but  one  of 
the  most  efficient  propagandists  of  his  time. 
As  he  was  novelist  in  ordinary  to  Our  Corner, 
so  he  became  pamphleteer  in  ordinary  to  the 
Fabian  Society.  He  edited  the  Fabian  Essays 
in  Socialism  in  1889,  two  of  the  essays  and,  of 
course,  the  preface  being  from  his  own  pen. 
One  of  the  lectures  he  had  previously  delivered 
on  the  7th  September,  1888,  to  the  Economic 
Section    of  the  British  Association  at  Bath. 

Besides  drafting  and  otherwise  aiding  the 
literary  and  economic  production   of   Fabian 

57 


Bernard   Shaw 

Tracts,  he  wrote  over  his  own  name:  The  Fahian 
Society  :  Its  Early  History  (this  was  first  read  as 
a  paper  at  a  conference  of  the  London  and 
Provincial  Fabian  societies  at  Essex  Hall  on  the 
6th  February,  1 892) ;  the  Impossibilities  of  Anar- 
chism ^  ^^93  >  Fabianism  and  the  Empire ^  1900  ; 
Socialism  for  Millionaires^  1 90 1  ;  and  Fabianism 
and  the  Fiscal  Question^  I904«  These  pamph- 
lets stand  out  among  the  rest  of  the  justly 
famous  Fabian  Tracts.  They  are  all  marked 
by  that  individual  note  of  philosophic  wit 
which  has  made  the  writings  of  Bernard  Shaw 
so  distinct  a  feature  of  modern  letters.  Besides 
the  official  publications  of  the  Fabian  Society, 
there  are  others  associated  with  his  Socialist 
activities.  The  verbatim  report  of  the  debate 
with  Mr.  G.  W.  Foote  on  the  Legal  Eight 
Hours  Question  at  the  Hall  of  Science  on 
14th  and  15th  January,  1891,  was  issued  as  a 
pamphlet  in  the  same  year,  and  in  1904  he 
issued  the  Common  Sense  of  Municipal  Trading 
on  the  eve  of  the  London  County  Council 
election,  when  he  stood  as  a  Progressive  can- 
didate for  South  St.  Pancras,  and  was  defeated 

J8 


The  Man 

owing  to  his  frank  admission  of  the  good 
points  in  the  then  Government's  Education 
Bill  of  1902,  upon  which  question  the  contest 
hinged.  He  however  sat  as  vestryman  and 
borough  councillor  for  St.  Pancras  from  1897 
to  1903  ;  and  though  the  reactionary  party 
was  in  an  overwhelming  majority  during  all 
that  period,  and  he  was  the  unofficial  leader  of 
the  Progressive  Opposition,  he  was  invariably 
elected  to  more  than  his  share  of  the  com- 
mittees in  which  the  real  work  of  such  bodies 
is  done,  as  he  was  found,  rather  unexpectedly, 
to  be  a  steady  attendant  and  a  level-headed 
man  of  business,  patient  of  detail  and  ad- 
ministrative drudgery. 

It  was  presumably  the  stern  call  of  "  the 
muse  of  daily  bread"  that  determined  his 
advent  into  journalism  in  the  year  of  his 
coming  to  London.  Between  that  year  and 
1879  he  "did  a  little  devilling  at  musical 
criticism,"  and  there  are  hints  in  a  published 
admission  of  the  beginning  of  a  "Passion 
Play  in  blank  verse,  with  the  mother  of  the 
hero  represented  as  a   termagant."     But  this 

59 


Bernard   Shaw 


youthful  ambition  was  not  completed.  For 
ten  years  he  contributed  to  the  Press  weekly 
critical  articles  on  music  first,  and  then  on  the 
drama.  These  began  on  music  in  The  Star 
in  1888-90  over  the  pseudonym  Corno  di 
Bassetto ;  and  were  continued  in  The  World 
from  1890-4.  Then  came  the  famous  Saturday 
Review  dramatic  criticisms  from  January, 
1895,  to  May,  1898,  which  gave  him  a 
unique  place  among  dramatic  critics.  A  selec- 
tion of  these,  entitled  Dramatic  Opinions,  was 
issued  in  the  spring  of  1906,  in  two  volumes, 
under  the  editorship  of  James  Huneker.  Be- 
sides his  regular  work  for  the  weekly  Press, 
there  are  several  instances  of  departure  from 
his  beaten  track  ;  among  these  are  two  essays 
which  must  be  reckoned  among  his  more  im- 
portant works.  The  first  is  a  letter  con- 
tributed to  the  pages  of  Benjamin  R.  Tucker's 
paper  Liberty'^  in  refutation  of  Max  Nordau's 
Degeneration ;  this  fine  piece  of  criticism  is 
much  more  than  an  ordinary  letter,  it  is  a 
masterly  essay  nearly  filling  the  whole  issue  of 
1  New  York,  July  27,  1895. 

60 


'  The  Man 

the  paper.  The  second  is  On  Going  to  Churchy 
perhaps  his  finest  essay  from  the  point  of  view 
of  pure  literature,  which  appeared  in  the  first 
number  of  The  Savoy  in  January  1896.  This 
period  of  journalism  was  one  requiring  great 
emphasis  of  personality,  a  faculty  Bernard 
Shaw  proved  himself  capable  of  supplying,  for, 
after  all,  it  was  in  the  columns  of  the  weekly 
Press  that  he  first  found  himself. 

The  discovery  was  the  result  of  his  char- 
acteristic earnestness,  coupled  with  the  fact 
that  he  not  only  had  something  to  say,  but 
knew  quite  clearly  what  that  something  was, 
"and  that  it  was  worthy  of  his  pen.  This  made 
his  essays  things  to  give  even  the  most  hardened 
newspaper  reader  pause  and  make  him  either 
pleased  or  vexed.  And  in  spite  of  that  mor- 
dant humour  which  misled  many,  the  few,  at 
all  events,  recognised  that  behind  this  sprightly 
and  trenchant  journalism  was  a  mind  that, 
besides  being  earnest  and  painstaking,  was 
fearless.  Out  of  this  work  grew  the  G.B.S. 
not  only  of  fact  but  of  fiction  :  the  one  G.B.S. 
created  for  a  public  prod  ;  the  other  G.B.S., 

61 


Bernard  Shaw 

whom  he  considers  the  most  successful  of  his 
fictions,  is  the  G.B.S.  whom  wise  men  read, 
mark,  learn,  and  inwardly  digest.  This  ten 
years  of  journalism  was,  as  he  says,  an  appren- 
ticeship which  made  him  master  of  his  own 
style. 

There  are  two  books  belonging  to  the 
period — one.  The  Quintessence  of  Ibsenism  (i  89 1), 
coming  at  the  beginning ;  the  other,  The 
Perfect  fVagnerite  (1898),  coming  at  the  close — 
these  form  good  examples  of  that  consistency 
of  thought  and  aim  which  characterises  his 
career.  Both  exhibit  that  mingling  of  prac- 
tical politics  with  the  more  abstract  thought : 
a  mind  seeking  a  solution  of  its  ideas  in 
practical  conduct.  The  Quintessence  of  Ibsenism 
was  originally  a  Fabian  lecture,  and  its  genesis 
is  explained  in  the  preface. 

"In  the  spring  of  1890,  the  Fabian  Society, 
finding  itself  at  a  loss  for  a  course  of  lectures 
to  occupy  its  summer  meetings,  was  compelled 
to  make  shift  with  a  series  of  papers  put 
forward  under  the  general  heading  Socialism  in 
Contemporary  Literature.   The  Fabian  Essayists, 

62 


The  Man 

Strongly  pressed  to  do  *  something  or  other,* 
for  the  most  part  shook  their  heads  ;  but  in 
the  end  Sydney  Olivier  consented  to  *  take 
Zola '  ;  I  consented  to  *  take  Ibsen '  ;  and 
Hubert  Bland  undertook  to  read  all  the 
Socialist  novels  of  the  day,  an  enterprise  the 
desperate  failure  of  which  resulted  in  the  most 
amusing  paper  of  the  series.  William  Morris, 
asked  to  read  a  paper  on  himself,  flatly  de- 
clined, but  gave  us  one  on  Gothic  Architecture. 
Stepniak  also  came  to  the  rescue  with  a  lecture 
on  modern  Russian  fiction  ;  and  so  the  society 
tided  over  the  summer  without  having  to  close 
its  doors,  but  also  without  having  added  any- 
thing whatever  to  the  general  stock  of  infor- 
mation on  Socialism  in  Contemporary  Litera- 
ture. After  this  I  cannot  claim  that  my  paper 
on  Ibsen,  which  was  duly  read  at  the  St. 
James's  Restaurant  on  the  i8th  July,  1890, 
under  the  presidency  of  Mrs.  Annie  Besant, 
and  which  was  the  first  form  of  this  little 
book,  is  an  original  work  in  the  sense  of  being 
the  result  of  a  spontaneous  internal  impulse  on 
my  part." 

63 


Bernard  Shaw 

This  probably  would  have  been  the  end  of 
The  Quintessence  of  Ibsenism  had  not  the  per- 
formance of  Rosmersholm,  Ghosts,  and  Hedda 
Gahler  in  London  "  started  a  frantic  newspaper 
controversy"  in  which  Bernard  Shaw  promptly 
realised  that  none  of  the  disputants  had  ever 
been  forced  to  make  up  their  minds  as  to  what 
Ibsen  really  meant.  So  with  that  desire  to 
inform  people  which  is  a  part  of  his  nature,  the 
old  lecture  was  rewritten,  and  with  additions 
was  issued  to  the  public  in  its  present  form. 
On  the  other  hand,  whilst  actuated  by  the 
same  public-spirited  desire,  The  Perfect  Wagnerite 
did  not  begin  in  Fabianism,  but  it  took  care  to 
end  there.  It  was  issued  in  1898  as  a  com- 
mentary on  the  Nihelungs  Ring,  and  takes  the 
form  of  an  interpretation  of  Wagner's  greatest 
work  in  the  light  of  the  revolutionary  ideas  of 
1848,  of  which  Wagner  was  an  enthusiastic 
supporter.     In  the  preface  Shaw  says  : — 

"All  I  pretend  to  do  in  this  book  is  to 
impart  the  ideas  which  are  most  likely  to  be 
lacking  in  the  conventional  Englishman's 
equipment.     I  came  by  them  myself  much  as 

64 


The  Man 

Wagner  did,  having  learnt  more  about  music 
than  about  anything  else  in  my  youth,  and 
sown  my  political  wild  oats  subsequently  in 
the  revolutionary  school.  This  combination 
is  not  common  in  England  ;  and  as  I  seem,  so 
far,  to  be  the  only  publicly  articulate  result  of 
it,  I  venture  to  add  my  commentary  to  what 
has  already  been  written  by  musicians  who  are 
no  revolutionists,  and  revolutionists  who  are 
no  musicians." 

During  these  years  of  a  literary  activity 
which  was  considerably  enhanced  latterly  by 
the  writing  and  production  of  plays,  Bernard 
Shaw  found  time  to  respond  to  the  demands 
that  are  always  made  upon  the  time  and  ability 
of  a  capable  revolutionary.  This  was  to  a 
considerable  extent  concentrated  in  the  aims 
of  the  Fabian  Society  and  its  correlative 
bodies.  But  his  skill  as  a  debater  and  his 
sparkling  facility  as  a  public  speaker  opened 
up  new  possibilities  for  work  of  which  organ- 
isers of  Socialist  clubs,  and  later,  of  any  and 
every  society  that  includes  lectures  in  its 
activities,  were  not  loth  to  make  use.     Shaw 


Bernard  Shaw 

reciprocated  and  gave  them  of  that  brilliant 
witty,  and  thought-provoking  oratory,  which 
was  urged  into  fluency  and  confidence  during 
his  apprenticeship  to  the  Socialist  movement 
beneath  the  Reformer's  Tree  in  Hyde  Park, 
at  many  a  meagre  open-air  meeting,  and  at  in- 
numerable hole-and-corner  clubs  all  over 
London.  Since  these  'prentice  days  in  Lon- 
don he  has  spoken  all  over  the  provinces  to 
continually  growing  audiences. 

He  has  a  resonant  but  not  by  any  means  an 
orator's  voice,  rather  the  voice  of  a  good  con- 
versationalist. In  fact  his  platform  eloquence 
is  more  akin  to  the  extension  of  conversational 
periods  into  monologue  than  to  ordinary  ora- 
tory. As  his  writing  lacks  what  is  generally 
accepted  as  literary  style  or  polish,  so  his 
speaking  possesses  none  of  the  usual  trappings 
of  the  platform.  Yet  the  style  is  there — at 
least  the  only  thing  that  is  worthy  the  name  of 
style  is  there — that  is,  the  distinction  given  to 
things  by  contact  with  a  commanding  person- 
ality. His  attitude  towards  his  audience  is 
that  of  one  who  is  informing  them  as  much 

66 


The  Man 

for  their  own  good  as  because  he  is  irritated  at 
their  remaining  in  ignorance  of  the  things 
they  ought  to  know  :  a  knowledge  of  which 
would  in  all  probability  make  them  more 
agreeable  to  him.  This  would  be  an  impos- 
sible attitude  for  a  public  speaker  did  he  not 
possess  a  sense  of  humour  in  addition  to 
religious  or  humanitarian  fervour,  and  wit 
as  well  as  skill  in  applying  a  balm  to  the 
wounded  pride  of  his  hearers.  The  attribute 
of  humour  has  never  been  denied  him,  and 
when  uttered  as  it  is  with  a  not  too  emphatic 
brogue  there  is  an  additional  charm  to  the 
spoken  words  of  this  candid  friend  of  the 
people. 

The  latest  literary  phase  of  Shaw  is  that  of 
dramatist.  As  a  maker  of  stage  plays  it  has 
been  his  lot  to  win  at  last  something  like  fame ; 
though,  indeed,  it  is  long  ago  since  he  lacked 
what  is  greater  than  fame — the  recognition  of 
his  peers.  His  own  story  of  his  gravitation 
from  dramatic  criticism  to  dramatic  authorship 
is  suggestive  of  pecuniary  necessity  and  a 
desire   to   supply  the   necessary  "  new "  play- 

67 


Bernard  Shaw 

Wright  for  the  "  new "  theatre  movement  of 
the  early  nineties.  Though  this  candid  ad- 
mission may  be,  and  probably  is,  taken  for  a 
piece  of  bluff  in  the  first  instance  and  vain 
boast  in  the  second,  it  is  best  to  accept  it  at 
its  face  value.  It  is  fully  in  keeping  with  the 
deliberation  of  Shaw's  whole  career.  Weekly 
journalism  he  knew  perfectly  well  could  not 
be  continued  at  a  high  level  of  sincerity  for 
any  length  of  time.  It  must  inevitably,  in 
the  light  of  human  capacity,  become  stale, 
used  up,  and  ultimately  fall  back  on  empty 
repetitions  and  those  vague  generalities  which 
adorn  the  pages  of  the  contemporary  com- 
mercial Press.  This  prospect  was  quite 
sufficient  to  force  a  man  in  earnest  to  look  out 
for  another  means  of  livelihood,  and  the  play, 
being  in  the  line  of  his  activities,  naturally 
suggested  itself.  There  was  reason  also  for 
this  in  the  fact  that  after  the  novel-writing 
period  there  was  a  futile  attempt  at  dramatic 
authorship  in  collaboration  with  Mr.  William 
Archer  in  1885.  The  result  of  this  partner- 
ship in  creative  enterprise  was  «//,  so  far  as  the 

68 


The  Man 

collaboration  went,  as  may  be  gathered  from 
this  passage  from  the  preface  to  Volume  I  of 
the  Plays :  Pleasant  and  Unpleasant : — 

"  Laying  violent  hands  on  his  (Mr.  Archer's) 
thoroughly  planned  scheme  for  a  sympathetic- 
ally romantic  *  well-made  play'  of  the  type 
then  in  vogue,  I  perversely  distorted  it  into  a 
grotesquely  realistic  exposure  of  slum-landlord- 
ism, municipal  jobbery,  and  the  pecuniary  and 
matrimonial  ties  between  them  and  the  pleasant 
people  of  *  independent '  incomes  who  imagine 
that  such  sordid  matters  do  not  touch  their 
own  lives."  The  sequel  was  that  Mr.  Archer 
"  promptly  disowned "  him.  But  two  acts 
were  written  by  the  realistic  party  of  the 
collaboration,  to  which  a  third  was  added  in 
1892,  and  the  whole  presented  to  the  public  at 
the  Royalty  Theatre  by  Mr.  Grein  under  the 
title  Widowers'  Houses. 

"  The  first  performance,"  says  its  author, 
"  was  sufficiently  exciting :  the  Socialists  and 
Independents  applauded  me  furiously  on  prin- 
ciple ;  the  ordinary  playgoing  first-nighters 
hooted  me  frantically  on  the  same  ground  ;  I, 

E  69 


Bernard   Shaw 

being  at  the  time  in  some  practice  as  what  is 
impolitely  called  a  mob  orator,  made  a  speech 
before  the  curtain  ;  the  newspapers  discussed 
the  play  for  a  whole  fortnight  not  only  in  the 
ordinary  theatrical  notices  and  criticisms,  but 
in  leading  articles  and  letters  ;  finally  the  text 
of  the  play  was  published  with  an  introduction 
by  Mr.  Grein,  an  amusing  account  by  Mr. 
Archer  of  the  original  collaboration,  and  a  long 
preface  and  several  elaborate  controversial 
appendices  in  the  author's  most  energetically 
egotistical  fighting  style."  So  this  proved  his 
first  play  both  in  order  of  composition,  per- 
formance, and  publication.  It  was  also  the 
first  number  of  the  Independent  Theatre's 
series  of  published  plays,  which  included  plays 
by  Tolstoy  and  Maeterlinck. 

The  plays  written  between  1892  and  1896 
were  included  in  the  two  volumes  published  in 
1898  under  the  title,  Plays:  Pleasant  and  Un- 
pleasant. The  first  volume  contained  the 
Unpleasant  plays,  namely  Widowers'  Houses  : 
A  Play;  The  Philanderer:  A  Topical  Comedy; 
and  Mrs,    Warren's  Profession:   A  Play.     The 

70 


The  Man 

Pleasant  plays  in  Volume  II  were  four  in 
number,  Arms  and  the  Man:  A  Comedy; 
Candida :  A  Mystery  ;  The  Man  of  Destiny :  A 
Trifle;  and  Ton  Never  Can  Tell :  A  Comedy. 
All  have  been  publicly  performed  except 
Mrs.  Warren's  Profession.  The  Philanderer 
only  received  nominal  publicity  in  the  first 
instance  in  a  performance  necessary  to  ensure 
the  author's  rights.  This  was  due  to  the  fact 
of  its  comedy  parts  being  above  the  capacity 
of  the  Independent  Theatre's  company  at  the 
time  it  was  written  in  1893.  ^^  ^^^  since,  and 
quite  recently,  had  a  successful  "  run  "  at  the 
Royal  Court  Theatre  and  been  placed  in  the 
repertoire  of  Messrs.  Vedrenne  &  Barker. 
Mrs.  Warren's  Profession  came  under  the  ban 
of  the  Censor  of  Plays  and  was  not  performed 
until  1902,  when  it  was  presented  privately  by 
the  Stage  Society  in  the  theatre  of  the  New 
Lyric  Club  on  the  5th  and  6th  of  January. 
The  occasion  was  celebrated  by  a  re-issue  of 
the  play  in  a  separate  volume  with  a  long 
prefatory  *' apology"  from  the  author  and 
excellent  photographs  of  the  players  by  Mr. 

71 


Bernard   Shaw 

Frederick  H.  Evans.  More  recently  (1905) 
Mrs.  IVarrens  Profession  set  New  York  and 
the  United  States  generally  agog  by  its  legal 
suppression  (since  rescinded),  after  two  public 
performances,  one  in  New  Haven  and  the 
other  in  New  York  City.  Performances  were 
possible  there  because  the  law  provides  that 
no  magisterial  veto  of  a  play  can  be  exercised 
until  after  at  least  one  performance. 

Three  Plays  for  Puritans^  containing  The 
DeviFs  Disciple^  Casar  and  Cleopatra^  and 
Captain  Brassbound's  Conversion^  was  published 
in  1901  ;  in  1903  Man  and  Superman  sought 
publicity  as  a  volume  with  much  additional 
matter  in  the  form  of  prefaces  and  appen- 
dices, one  of  these  last  being  The  Revolu- 
tionists Handbook^  supposed  to  emanate  from 
the  pen  of  John  Tanner,  the  anarchist  hero  of 
the  play.  It  is  in  these  prefaces  and  appen- 
dices with  which  all  his  volumes  are  re-issued 
that  the  philosophic  genius  of  Bernard  Shaw 
has  become  most  expository,  and  his  pre- 
dilection for  explaining  himself  has  reached 
heights  of  witty  and  passionate  exposition  that 

72 


The  Man 

has  made  them  unique  in  literature.  In  fact, 
the  use  of  this  method  of  exposition  of  the 
written  drama  is  a  discovery  of  first  importance, 
and  will  no  doubt  become  usual  in  the  more 
earnest  dramatic  publications.  For  it  makes 
it  possible  now  for  dramatists  who,  like  Ibsen, 
have  something  to  say  apart  from  merely 
telling  a  pretty  or  thrilling  story,  which  may 
be  variously  construed  from  the  .  symbolic 
representations  of  the  stage,  to  say  definitely 
in  the  printed  version  of  their  work  what 
actual  idea  they  had  in  mind  during  its  con- 
struction— a  task  which,  apart  from  the  amiable 
and  popular  desire  for  commercial  success, 
would  no  doubt  cause  considerable  difficulty 
to  many  of  our  native  playwrights. 

Man  and  Superman  was  issued  before  its 
public  performance,  which  did  not  take  place 
until  the  year  1905.  In  the  sanjie  year  at  the 
Royal  Court  Theatre  John  Bull's  Other  Island 
(written  originally  for  the  Irish  National 
Theatre),  How  He  hied  to  Her  Husband^  and 
Major  Barbara  were  produced,  and  in  1906 
The  Doctor's  Dilemma.     Of  these  four  the  last 

73 


Bernard   Shaw 

only  has  not  yet  appeared  in  book  form.  The 
three  others  appeared  in  June  (1907)  in  a 
volume  which  contains,  in  addition  to  the 
plays,  some  of  the  best  examples  of  the 
prefatory  art  of  which  he  is  a  master.  With 
the  performance  of  John  Bull's  Other  Island  the 
public,  or  more  properly  speaking  a  public, 
has  realised  how  enjoyable  a  drama  of  ideas 
can  be  when  written  by  Shaw,  and  a  con- 
sequent fashion  has  set  in  which  demands  as 
much  Bernard  Shaw  as  the  proprietors  of  the 
Sloane  Square  Theatre  can  supply. 

He  did  not  marry  until  1898,  when  in 
Miss  Charlotte  Frances  Payne-Townshend  he 
found  a  kindred  spirit.  Mrs.  Bernard  Shaw 
serves  with  him  on  the  executive  committee  of 
the  Fabian  Society,  and  takes  a  keen  and  capable 
interest  in  his  art  and  his  many  public  activi- 
ties. Although  of  late  the  number  of  his 
lectures  to  small  societies  has  necessarily  been 
curtailed,  he  is  still  a  familiar  figure  at  public 
Socialist  meetings.  He  is  as  familiar,  in  fact, 
on  the  platform  of  ideas  as  his  drama  is  in  the 
theatre  of  ideas,  and  he  always  finds  time,  ful- 

74 


The  Man 

filling  the  adage  that  the  busiest  man  has  the 
most  time  to  spare,  to  help  voice  the  cause 
of  progress,  be  it  Socialism  in  England  or 
Enfranchisement  in  Russia,  or  the  less  em- 
phatic but  none  the  less  important  aims  of  the 
numerous  societies  interested  in  the  modern 
presentation  of  philosophy  and  art. 

Still,  even  with  this  picture  of  steady  energy 
in  the  service  of  ideas  which  are  decidedly 
inimical  to  all  that  makes  for  the  oppression  of 
humanity — that  same  humanity  has  not  enough 
common  sense  to  see  in  him  anything  but 
a  brilliant  farceur.  But  here  one  must  not  be 
too  hard  on  the  ordinary  folk  who  man  the 
national  ships  ;  for  after  all  as  has  been  said, 
the  G.B.S.  of  the  public  mind  is  not  of  the 
public  creation  ;  this  feat  must  be  laid  at  the 
door  of  G.B.S.  himself.  It  was  he  who  created 
the  fascinating  irritant.  The  G.B.S.  of  fiction 
was  brought  into  being  by  the  G.B.S.  of  fact. 
*'  I  have  advertised  myself  so  well,"  he  says, 
"  that  I  find  myself  almost  as  legendary  a 
person  as  the  Flying  Dutchman." 

The  non-legendary   G.B.S.  Is,  however,  by 

75 


Bernard  Shaw 

no  means  unfamiliar  to  Londoners  in  his 
corporeal  state.  In  his  earlier  days  in  London 
Bernard  Shaw  was,  as  is  well  known,  notable 
in  matters  of  appearance  ;  sandy-haired  and 
Jaeger-clad,  with  a  short  beard  that  had  never 
made  acquaintance  with  a  razor.  But  to-day 
he  is  more  like  other  men  to  look  upon  in  so 
far  as  his  clothes,  if  not  his  beard,  are  of  some- 
what formal  cut  and  cloth.  His  sandy  hair, 
which  is  parted  in  the  middle  and  brushed  well 
back  from  a  square  forward  brow,  and  his  beard, 
which  is  longer  than  of  yore,  are  toned  down 
with  grey.  He  is  of  the  average  height  and 
easy  in  carriage  ;  his  head,  which  is  remark- 
ably square  between  the  brows  with  a  crown 
which  depends  towards  the  neck  in  a  line 
unusually  free  from  curve,  is  set  well  back, 
and  his  ears  have  a  forward  tilt.  His  eyebrows 
are  at  the  mephisto-angle,  and  he  has  steady 
blue  eyes.  It  is  the  head  of  a  fighter  who 
prefers  a  frontal  attack.  At  the  same  time 
there  Is,  in  his  general  appearance,  a  hint  of 
one  who  could  strike  comfortable  attitudes 
and  lounge  had  he  the  desire  to  do  so  ;  there 

76 


The  Man 

is  again  something  about  his  immobile,  yet 
alert  head  in  strange  contrast  with  his  curiously 
mobile  and  expressive  arms  and  hands.  This 
is  well  brought  out  on  the  platform  in  moments 
of  oratorical  heat,  when  with  head  thrown 
back,  hair  and  brows  seeming  to  bristle,  and 
eyes  sparkling  to  match  his  peculiar  eloquence, 
he  stands  quite  still,  but  moves  his  hands  and 
arms  in  a  kind  of  gesticulating  punctuation. 
Not,  however,  the  swinging  notes  of  exclama- 
tion which  are  the  gesticulating  stock-in-trade 
of  the  politician  with  the  roaring  oratorical 
manner,  but  movements  of  hand  and  wrist, 
and  even  elbow,  which  add  the  commas,  semi- 
colons, full-stops,  and  interrogatory  notes, 
to  his  irresistibly  spoken  sentences. 

The  personality  of  Bernard  Shaw  speaks 
through  his  appearance.  To  look  at  him  one 
would  immediately  conclude  that  he  cared 
little  for  what  others  thought  of  him,  but 
much  as  to  what  he  thought  of  himself.  His 
pose  is  unconsciously  deliberate  and  quite 
frank,  and  entirely  free  from  superior  reserve. 
He  is  an  approachable  man  and  he  looks  it. 

77 


Bernard  Shaw 

And  although  he  is  free  from  the  super-polish 
of  the  carefully-groomed  city  man,  there  is  a 
well-ordered  and  easy  neatness  in  his  appear- 
ance which  is  innate  rather  than  adopted. 
This  absence  of  pose  in  one  who  is  ostensibly  on 
appreciative  terms  with  himself  is  unexpected. 
But  it  is  quite  in  keeping  with  his  inner  neces- 
sity for  energetic  self-expression  coupled  with 
a  natural  dislike  of  the  merely  decorative  in 
life.  His  personal  appearance  is  that  of  a  man 
who  stands  for  somethings  but  that  something  is 
not  formal  ornament  or  fashion,  even  were  it 
of  his  own  creating.  It  is  a  form  expressive 
of  power — power  to  accomplish  his  own  ends. 
And  one  of  the  accomplishments  of  this 
personality  is  the  creation  of  an  intellectual 
conception  of  himself  that  holds  a  greater  place 
in  the  contemporary  mind  than  the  reality, 
and  one  fears  nowthat  the  reality  would  take  less 
laying  than  its  ghost.  However,  half  a  loaf  is 
better  than  no  bread  at  all,  and  as  the  G.B.S. 
of  fiction  is  by  no  means  so  mythical  as  Mrs. 
Harris,  we  have  cause  to  hope.  The  pro- 
cess of  creation  seems  to  have  been  along  the 

78 


The  Man 

line  of  the  exaggerated  personalisation  of  all 
the  more  whimsical,  humorous,  and  paradoxi- 
cal traits  in  his  character,  with  the  salient 
omission  of  the  steadying  value  of  seriousness 
which  is  behind  all  but  the  hopelessly  frivolous 
types.  The  creation  of  this  figure  out  of  the 
most  conscious  tendencies  of  a  distinct  per- 
sonality was  bound  to  be  attractive,  and  the 
author  was  readily  taken  at  his  word.  But  he 
is  now  "getting  a  bit  tiresome"  even  to  his 
creator.  "  G.B.S.,"  he  says,  "  gets  on  my 
nerves  and  bores  me,"  adding  with  a  sugges- 
tive reference  to  that  seriously  purposeful  side 
of  his  character  of  which  I  have  spoken, 
"except  when  he  is  working  out  something 
solid  for  me,  or  saying  what  I  want  said."  So 
probably  the  public  also  will  grow  aweary  of 
this  facile  G.B.S.  and  demand  better  acquaint- 
ance of  the  less  entertaining  but  more  satisfy- 
ing personality  behind  the  veil  of  amazing 
anti-climax  and  elusive  wit. 

The  real  Bernard  Shaw  is  a  fact.  He  is 
just  one  of  those  minds  which  must  be 
grappled  with  before  any  proper  conception  of 

79 


Bernard  Shaw 

modern  thought  is  possible.  His  attitude 
towards  society  is  a  critical  one,  and  his  work 
stands  for  the  conception  of  society  minus  the 
traditional  and  romantic  glamour  which  is 
three  parts  of  the  average  view  of  things. 
He  is,  in  short,  a  realist  with  the  courage  of 
his  convictions,  which  happen  to  be  his  own  in 
this  instance  and  not  another's.  This  explains 
the  parrot  cry  of  originality  which  dogs  his 
utterances  like  an  evil  spirit.  "  What  the 
world  calls  originality  "  he  says,  "  is  only  an 
unaccustomed  method  of  tickling  it."  It  is 
this  unaccustomed  tickling  that  is  a  by-product 
of  Shaw's  genius.  He  is  not  only  a  realist 
with  the  courage  of  his  conviction,  but,  what 
is  more  rare,  he  is  in  his  own  existence  an 
epitome  of  his  opinions.  These  opinions,  in 
short,  are  nothing  more  nor  less  than  the 
philosophic  deductions  of  his  own  personality. 
He  deliberately  exploits  his  personality  for  the 
benefit  of  humanity  and  the  satisfaction  of  an 
abnormal  desire  for  a  seemliness  in  social  life 
which,  in  his  case,  has  begun  at  home. 

He  sees  things  from  an  aspect  which  might 

80 


— '    The  Man 

be  called  traditionless,  in  so  far  as  tradition  is 
dominated  by  actuality.  It  has  been  explained 
by  himself  as  an  excess  of  normality  of  sight ; 
a  quickness  of  vision  which  must  be  so  rare  as 
to  be  almost  abnormal.  What  is  abnormal  in 
his  vision  is  the  readiness  with  which  the 
critical  and  perceptive  faculties  of  the  brain 
work  together.  His  own  record  of  a  visit 
to  an  ophthalmic  surgeon  is  worth  noting 
here. 

"  He  tested  my  eyesight  one  evening,  and 
informed  me  that  it  was  quite  uninteresting  to 
him  because  it  was  *  normal.'  I  naturally 
took  this  to  mean  that  it  was  like  everybody 
else's  ;  but  he  rejected  this  construction  as 
paradoxical,  and  hastened  to  explain  to  me  that 
I  was  an  exceptional  and  highly  fortunate 
person  optically,  *  normal '  sight  conferring  the 
power  of  seeing  things  accurately,  and  being 
enjoyed  by  only  about  ten  per  cent  of  the 
population,  the  remaining  ninety  per  cent 
being  abnormal.  I  immediately  perceived  the 
explanation  of  my  want  of  success  in  fiction. 
My  mind's  eye,  like  my  body's,  was  *  normal ' ; 

8i 


Bernard  Shaw 

it  saw  things  differently  from  other  people's 
eyes,  and  saw  them  better." 

This  normality  of  sight  he  would  no  doubt 
extend  to  the  description  of  his  personal  afi'airs, 
his  daily  round  of  social  performances,  his 
habits  being  of  so  simple  an  order  as  to  make 
of  him  the  '  odd  man  out '  in  society.  Yet 
they  have  contributed  more  than  anything 
towards  that  independence  of  expression  which 
has  made  him  a  force  in  modern  thought — a 
distinct  personality.  He  early  realised,  as  we 
have  seen,  the  truth  that  freedom  was  largely 
determined  by  the  things  we  can  do  without, 
a  truth  which,  fully  realised,  makes  comparative 
poverty,  no  less  than  the  comforts  that  the 
swing  of  the  pendulum  may  offer,  less  evil 
and  destructive.  "  Simplicity  is  the  last  refuge 
of  complexity,"  said  Oscar  Wilde  ;  a  paradox 
which  is  strangely  true  in  the  light  of  Bernard 
Shaw's  description  of  his  own  simple  life.  "  I 
cannot  say  that  I  have  much  experience  of  real 
poverty,"  he  says,  "  quite  the  contrary.  Before 
I  could  earn  anything  with  my  pen,  I  had  a 
magnificent  library  in  Bloomsbury,  a  priceless 

82 


The  Man 

picture  gallery  in  Trafalgar  Square,  and  another 
at  Hampton  Court,  without  any  servants  to 
look  after  or  rent  to  pay.  As  to  music,  I 
actually  got  paid  later  on  for  saturating  myself 
with  the  best  of  it  from  London  to  Bayreuth. 
Nature  and  mankind  are  common  property. 
Friends  !  Lord  bless  me,  my  visiting  list  has 
always  been  of  an  unpurchasable  value  and 
exclusiveness.  What  could  I  have  bought 
with  more  than  enough  money  to  feed  and 
clothe  me  }  Cigars  ?  1  don't  smoke.  Cham- 
pagne ?  I  don't  drink.  Thirty  suits  of 
fashionable  clothes  .''  The  people  I  most  avoid 
would  ask  me  to  dinner  if  1  could  be  per- 
suaded to  wear  such  things.  Horses  ? 
They're  dangerous.  Carriages  ?  They're 
sedentary  and  tiresome.  By  this  time  I  can 
afford  to  sample  them  ;  but  I  buy  nothing  1 
didn't  buy  before.  Besides,  I  have  an  imagi- 
nation. Ever  since  I  can  remember,  I  have 
only  had  to  go  to  bed  and  shut  my  eyes  to  be 
and  do  whatever  I  pleased.  What  are  the  _J 
trumpery  Bond  Street  luxuries  to  me,  George 
Bernard  Sardanapalus  ! "     That  is  the  person- 

83 


Bernard  Shaw 

ality  he  has  distilled    into  a  philosophy  and 
expressed  in  art. 

It  was  largely  this  simple  demand  upon 
material  things  that  made  it  possible  for  him 
to  keep  his  art  clean  of  mercenary  temptations. 
It  is  the  artificial  needs  created  by  the  civilisa- 
tion under  which  we  live  that  are  largely 
responsible  for  the  prevalence  of  that  scamping 
so  obvious  in  the  art  work  of  to-day.  The 
writer  or  painter,  the  musician  or  sculptor 
who  desires  to  keep  the  ever-increasing  pace 
of  the  luxurious  middle  class,  must  produce 
something  that  the  rich  will  buy  at  a  high 
price,  or  that  the  masses  who  are  not  rich  will 
buy  at  a  low  price,  but  in  such  numbers  as 
will  make  up  the  difference.  Art  is  dependent 
for  its  reward  upon  the  demands  of  these  two 
classes.  If  such  a  reward  is  the  demand  of 
the  artist  then  there  is  ample  opportunity  for 
realising  it.  On  the  other  hand  the  artist  who 
desires  other  reward  than  the  satisfying  of  the 
superficial  tastes,  or  deeper  prejudices  of  the 
major  portion  of  humanity,  must  have  other 
means  of  subsistence  or  lessen  his  denominator. 

84 


The  Man 

Shaw  lessened  his  denominator.  This  prob- 
ably was  no  privation.  His  tastes  were  not 
the  popular  tastes.  They  were  not  tastes  that 
would  require  the  income  of  a  Cabinet 
Minister  to  satisfy.  He  contained  in  his  own 
composition  almost  all  that  most  people  have 
to  seek  and  buy  dearly  elsewhere. 

But  apart  from  the  exigencies  of  his  circum- 
stances Bernard  Shaw's  method  of  living  has 
been  largely,  as  might  be  deduced  from  the 
last  quotation,  the  result  of  a  kind  of  super- 
tastefulness.  He  is  in  reality  an  epicurean. 
His  taste  is  distinctive  and  severe  to  fastidi- 
ousness. It  is  by  nature  peculiarly  free 
from  what  is  gross,  and  if  at  points  it  leans 
towards  what  is  ascetic,  this  is  entirely  due  to 
predilection.  There  is  evidence  of  a  selective 
ordering  of  his  life,  and  in  a  way  his  habits 
remind  one  of  the  New  Cyrenaicism  of  Pater. 
Like  Marius  the  Epicurean  he  would  seem  to 
have  condemned  all  in  himself  that  had  "  not 
passed  a  long  and  liberal  process  of  erasure," 
and  his  attitude  towards  society  is  a  critical 
extension  of  this  process  to  the  things  he  con- 
siders socially  blameworthy. 

F  85 


Bernard   Shaw 

At  the  same  time  the  virility  with  which 
his  criticism  of  society  is  imbued  has  its  parallel 
in  his  personality.  It  is  here  that  Shaw  parts 
company  with  such  a  type  as  Marius.  One 
never  feels  for  a  moment  that  his  sensitiveness 
to  what  is  ugly  is  neurotic,  but  rather  that  it 
results  from  a  kind  of  nervous  health  ;  a 
robustness  of  feeling  that  rejects  rather  than 
fears  what  is  offensive.  His  mind  is  no  slave  of 
the  introspective  habit.  No  sooner  is  he  con- 
vinced of  the  practicability  of  an  idea  than  he 
takes  action.  He  is  no  brooder.  This  is 
why  he  becomes  something  rather  than  remain- 
ing a  mere  advocate  of  something.  His  mind 
responds  readily  to  his  feelings — in  fact,  his 
mind  is  the  conscious  instrument  and  interpre- 
ter of  a  rare  and  assertive  taste. 

He  is  neither  so  remote  nor  so  reticent  as 
Pater's  exquisite  hero,  and  there  is  a  note  of 
humour  and  abandonment  in  his  utterance  that 
would  have  made  Marius  shrink.  "  Lenten 
fare "  with  Shaw  has  by  no  means  produced 
"  lenten  thought,"  and  his  sharpness  of  wit  is 
bitter-sweet,  savouring  of  his  beloved  fruits. 

86 


The  Man 

And  although  his  tastes  are  so  instinctive  they 
are  quite  deliberate.  One  feels  that  he  has 
taken  pains  to  know  what  he  wants.  Indeed, 
this  is  a  notable  characteristic.  As  he  did  not 
shirk  the  drudgery  incidental  to  his  municipal 
experiences,  neither  does  he  delegate  the  spade- 
work  of  the  ordinary  channels  of  an  author's 
days. 

With  the  exquisite  ordering  of  his  life  there 
goes  along  a  magnanimity  which  will  surprise 
those  who  know  him  only  through  the  ironic 
Shawisms  of  the  paragraphist.  He  has  given 
himself  freely.  He  has  given  of  his  best  for 
years  without  reward.  He  has  worked  un- 
remittingly for  a  despised  cause,  and  now  that 
he  has  fame  he  does  not  alter  his  course.  And 
although  his  word  is  bitter  for  the  things  he 
knows  to  be  wrong,  no  one  has  been  more 
generous  in  his  estimation  of  the  things  he 
upholds — even  when  they  are  the  products  of 
a  younger  generation  that  may  supplant  the 
older,  including  himself.  Bernard  Shaw  says 
"  come  in  "  to  the  Younger  Generation  knock- 
ing at    the    door.     This    magnanimity  which 

87 


Bernard  Shaw 

does  not  fear  its  own  fame  is  closely  related  to 
a  noticeable  freedom  from  any  tendency  to 
condescension  on  his  part,  and  he  seems  to 
be  immune  from  those  prevalent  complaints 
of  the  artistic  fraternity  which  express  them- 
selves in  personal  pique.  He  is  not  susceptible 
to  petty  offence,  and  he  suffers  fools  with  in- 
difference, if  not  with  gladness.  He  can  take 
a  blow  with  as  much  good  humour  as  he  can 
give  one.  He  has  none  of  that  righteous 
indignation  which  is  a  very  common  form  of 
self-defence,  but  in  place  of  it  we  have  his 
explanations — he  does  not  defend  himself,  he 
explains  himself. 

His  method  of  admonishing  a  lethargic 
public  has  not  had  any  instantaneous  good 
results.  And  the  quality  of  his  humour,  as 
has  been  indicated,  is  probably  the  main  cause 
of  this,  in  addition,  of  course,  to  a  correspond- 
ing lack  of  it  in  his  readers.  For  the  more 
he  lashes  these  amiable  folk  the  more  they 
laugh — in  fact,  the  extent  of  the  public's 
amusement  at  Bernard  Shaw  is  the  extent  of 
their  missing  the  point. 


The  Man 

But  recently  there  is  a  marked  change. 
Some  of  his  utterances  have  struck  home,  and 
the  gentlemen  in  the  first-class  compartment 
say  this  fellow  is  going  too  far,  and  reasoning 
from  the  recent  success  of  the  Vedrenne-Barker 
productions  of  his  plays,  argue  that  G.B.S.  is 
overcome  with  his  own  importance  and 
imagines  he  is  privileged  to  say  what  he  will, 
because  they,  forsooth,  have  condescended  to 
laugh  at  what  he  has  said.  The  humour  of  it 
(and  the  sadness  of  it  also)  is  that  Shaw  never 
intended  laughter  to  be  final  in  the  first 
instance,  and  in  the  second,  the  things  that 
surprise  them  so  much  to-day  are  the  selfsame 
things  he  has  been  saying  for  the  past  twenty 
years.  If  there  is  a  fault  it  is  in  his  public 
who  have  necessitated  this  reiteration.  The 
G.B.S.  of  fiction  ought  to  have  been  exploded 
long  ago  and  his  creator  at  work  on  the  next 
creation.  But  let  us  hope  that  his  philosophic 
hammer  has  at  last  tapped  a  vulnerable  spot  on 
John  Bull's  anatomy,  and  that  that  gentleman 
is  now  in  the  way  of  learning  what  dis- 
criminating students  have  known  for  years. 

89 


Bernard  Shaw 

I  It  must  also  be  borne  in  mind  that  the 
amused  attitude  of  the  public  towards  G.  B.  S. 
is  reciprocated  by  himself,  for  Shaw  has  many 
of  the  traits  of  a  laughing  philosopher,although 
his  laughter  is  what  Meredith  would  call  "  the 
laughter  of  the  mind — nearer  a  smile."  He 
does  not  pretend  to  be  amused,  not  even  in 
the  spirit  of  comedy,  dear  to  the  author  of 
"  Diana  of  the  Crossways."  His  laughter  is 
more  in  the  nature  of  a  whip — it  stings  while 
it  pleases,  but  it  is  meant  as  a  scourge.  He 
sees  life  steadily  and  sees  it  whole  with  such 
pertinacity  that  he  is  overwrought  by  every  in- 
consistency, and  he  laughs  aloud  when  another 
might  wail  as  Jeremiah  did,  or  utter  splendid 
wrath  like  Isaiah,  or  be  imperturbably  patient 
like  Job.  These  are  various  methods — each 
in  its  way  effective.  But  Bernard  Shaw  laughs 
at  the  ways  of  men  with  Aristophanes,  with 
Rabelais,  and  with  Heine — and  he  is  none  the 
less  serious.  A  great  deal  of  the  mirth-pro- 
voking matter  in  his  work  is  no  laughing 
matter  at  all  and  was  never  meant  to  be  ;  no 
more  a  laughing  matter  than  the  wisdom  of 

90 


The  Man 

Keegan  in  John  Bull's  Other  Island  is  insanity. 
"  My  way  of  joking,"  says  Keegan,  "  is  to  tell 
the  truth  ;  it  is  the  funniest  joke  in  the 
world,"  and  this  might  be  Shaw  speaking — and 
probably  is. 

Readers  of  the  Autocrat  of  the  Breakfast  Table 
will  remember  a  suggestive  observation  to  the 
effect  that  until  a  man  sees  himself  as  others 
see  him  there  must  be  at  least  six  persons  in 
every  dialogue  between  two.  "  It  is  natural 
enough,"  the  Autocrat  adds,  "that  among  the 
six  there  should  be  more  or  less  confusion  and 
misapprehension."  Something  like  this  hap- 
pens between  most  original  authors  and  their 
public,  and  when  you  get  a  multiple  personality 
like  the  author  of  the  Three  Plays  for  Puritans, 
with  his  prefaces  and  appendices  bristling  with 
criticisms  objectively  and  subjectively  personal, 
haranguing  a  public  which  is  hyper-self-con- 
scious and  almost  invincibly  dull,  your  com- 
plications are  as  likely  as  not  to  be  highly 
diverting.  And  apart  from  the  ordinary  six 
persons  of  the  traffic  between  author  and 
public,  there  is  the  disturbing  element  in  this 

91 


Bernard   Shaw 

instance  of  the  first  contracting  party  creating 
other  diversions  than  the  conventional  trinity 
in  his  own  person.  He  must  create  a  G.B.S., 
for  instance,  who  with  the  other  three,  the  ex- 
planatory, the  critical,  and  the  creative,  has 
succeeded  in  making  the  confusion  of  person- 
ality worse  confounded. 

However,  the  discriminating,  before  alluded 
to,  have  learnt  that  Bernard  Shaw's  various 
mediums  of  expression  are  the  interpretations 
of  a  philosophy  as  consistent  as  Euclid,  yet  so 
broad  as  not  to  exclude  any  endeavour  for  the 
extinction  of  suffering  and  for  the  common 
participation  in  the  joy  of  life  by  the  energy  of 
a  will  that  is  conscious  of  itself  and  quick  to 
respond  to  the  deep  purpose  of  life — "  the 
being  used  for  a  purpose  recognised  by  your- 
self as  a  might)^  one ;  the  being  thoroughly 
worn  out  before  you  are  thrown  on  the  scrap 
heap  ;  the  being  a  force  of  Nature  instead  of 
a  feverish  selfish  little  clod  of  ailments  and 
grievances  complaining  that  the  world  will  not 
devote  itself  to  making  you  happy."  With 
this  aim   in  view  he  has  become  a  modern 


92 


The  Man 

Socrates— doing  for  England  by  means  of 
stage-play  and  essay,  lecture  and  epistle,  what 
Socrates  did  for  ancient  Athens  by  con- 
versation and  example.  The  same  spirit  of 
social  welfare  breathes  through  his  utterances, 
making  of  him  another  gadfly  stinging  by  his 
skilled  use  of  words  the  lethargic  members  of 
the  state  into  rightful  action. 


93 


II 

THE    FABIAN 


"^*sj)he  vitality  which  places  nourishment  and  children  first, 
heaven  and  hell  a  somewhat  remote  second,  and  the  health  of 
society  as  an  organic  whole  nowhere,  may  muddle  successfully 
through  the  comparatively  tribal  stages  of  gregariousness ; 
but  in  nineteenth-century  nations  and  twentieth-century  em- 
pires the  determination  of  every  man  to  be  rich  at  all  costs, 
and  of  every  woman  to  be  married  at  all  costs,  must,  without 
a  highly  scientific  social  organisation,  produce  a  ruinous 
development  of  poverty,  celibacy,  prostitution,  infant  mor- 
tality, adult  degeneracy,  and  everything  that  wise  men  most 
dread.  In  short,  there  is  no  future  for  men,  however  brim- 
ming with  crude  vitality,  who  are  neither  intelligent  nor 
politically  educated  enough  to  be  Socialists.  {U^an  and 
Superman.     Preface,  pp.  xv-xvi,  1903,^ 


II 

THE    FABIAN 

A  BETTER  comprehension  of  the  attitude 
of  Bernard  Shaw  towards  society  is  ob- 
tained after  a  correct  understanding  of  his 
position  as  a  Fabian  Socialist,  for  the  main 
issues  of  his  practical  politics  are  summed  up 
in  those  two  words,  "^any  of  his  books  and 
plays  may  suggest  social  reform,  some  of  them 
demand  it  more  or  less  directly — but  each  of 
his  books  is  only  propagandist  in  the  strictly 
Fabian  sensed-  Many  of  the  plays  lend  them- 
selves to  sociological  deduction  in  the  scientific 
sense  apart  from,  yet  as  a  decided  outcome  of, 
their  deeper  philosophy r'-^-^idowers'  Houses^  for 
instance,  suggests  Housing  Reform  ;  Mrs, 
fVarrens  Profession^  alteration  of  the  conditions 
under  which  women  earn  their  living  ;  Major 
Barbara  suggests  the  failure  of  Charity,  and 

97 


Bernard   Shaw 

so  on^>  If  we  except  a  few  passages,  it  is  only 
in  tne  avowedly  propagandist  volumes  and 
pamphlets  that  Bernard  Shaw  frankly  advo- 
cates Socialism.  He  reproves  his  fellows  for 
their  indifference  to  the  claims  of  Socialism, 
but  anything  in  the  nature  of  tub-thumping 
is  quite  absent  from  these  books.  The  indirect 
Socialist  criticism  of  the  plays  is  a  Fabian 
characteristic.  It  is  a  part  of  that  subtle  and 
effective  propaganda  in  the  development  of 
which  Bernard  Shaw  has  taken  a  prominent 
part. 

But  when  one  speaks  of  Bernard  Shaw  the 
Fabian,  one  does  not  mean  that  it  is  possible 
to  put  him  in  a  pigeon-hole  with  a  lot  of  other 
similar  political  details  ;  indeedf>l^  is  a  good 
example  of  the  dissimilarity  of  rhe  Fabian 
Society's  units,  whose  similarity  lies  in  the 
adoption  of  a  central  idea  and  an  agreement  as 
to  the  method  of  its  enunciatiojj>  The  margin 
for  possible  idiosyncrasy  in  the  Fabian  Society 
is  a  generous  one,  wide  enough  to  admit  that 
play  of  individuality  which  exists,  as  Shaw 
says,  in  the  Executive  Committee,  where  it  is 

98 


The  Fabian 

inspiring  to  learn  "  no  one  of  us  is  strong 
enough  to  impose  his  will  on  the  rest,  or  weak 
enough  to  allow  himself  to  be  overridden." 
In  this  chapter,  under  the  word  Fabian,  are 
grouped  all  those  outward  and  visible  signs  of 
his  criticism  of  life  which  express  themselves 
in  either  social  or  political  practice.  For  there 
is  a  distinction  about  his  Fabianism,  his  whole 
personality  being  in  the  nature  of  propaganda  ; 
it  is  in  his  clothing,  at  his  table,  in  his  talk, 
and  in  his  art.  He  is  not  merely  a  complete 
revolutionary  in  his  attitude  towards  civilisa- 
tion, but  he  is  a  complete  Fabian  in  the  scope 
and  variety  of  his  remedies.  So  when  we  are 
confronted  with  ideas  of  dietetic  reform  and 
Jaeger  clothing,  with  hatred  of  "  Sport "  and 
Vivisection,  side  by  side  with  exhortations  on 
Land  Nationalisation,  the  Re-administration 
of  Municipal  Areas,  and  the  breeding  of  Super- 
men, a  reasonable  computation  will  trace  these 
themes  to  the  radii  of  a  circle  whose  centre  is 
the  Fabian  idea. 

The  beginning  of  Bernard  Shaw's  Socialism 
was,  as  we  have  seen,  the  hearing  of  Henry 

99 


Bernard  Shaw 

George  at  the  Memorial  Hall,  Farringdon 
Street,  during  the  famous  Single  Tax  campaign 
in  England  in  1882,  and  his  eyes  were  opened 
to  the  economic  needs  of  modern  times  in  the 
cause  of  which  he  has  worked  ever  since.  After 
hearing  George,  he  read  Karl  Marx's  Das  Kapi- 
taly  and  these  two  completed  that  revolution 
in  his  ideas  which  resulted  in  Socialism.  The 
evolution  of  this  into  the  Fabian  id^  is 
best  told  in  his  own  words.  He  says  :  Xjhe 
importance  of  the  economic  basis  dawned  on 
me  :  I  read  Marx,  and  was  exactly  in  the 
mood  for  his  reduction  of  all  the  conflicts  to 
the  conflict  of  classes  for  economic  mastery, 
of  all  social  forms  to  the  economic  forms  of 
production  and  exchange.  But  the  real  secret 
of  Marx's  fascination  was  his  appeal  to  an  un- 
named, unrecognised  passion — a  new  passion 
— the  passion  of  hatred  in  the  more  generous 
souls  among  the  respectable  and  educated  sec- 
tions for  the  accursed  middle-class  institutions 
that  had  starved,  thwarted,  misled,  and  cor- 
rupted them  from  their  cradles.  Marx's 
Capital  is  not  a  treatise  on  Socialism  ;   it  is 

100 


The   Fabian 

a  jeremiad  against  the  bourgeoisie,  supported 
by  such  a  mass  of  evidence  and  such  a  relentless 
Jewish  genius  for  denunciation  as  had  never 
been  brought  to  bear  before.  It  was  supposed 
to  be  written  for  the  working  classes  ;  but  the 
working-man  respects  the  bourgeoisie,  and 
wants  to  be  a  bourgeois  ;  Marx  never  got 
hold  of  him  for  a  moment.  It  was  the  re- 
volting sons  of  the  bourgeoisie  itself — Las- 
salle,  Marx,  Liebknecht,  Morris,  Hyndman, 
Bax,  all,  like  myself,  bourgeois  crossed  with 
squirearchy — that  painted  the  flag  red.  Baku- 
nin  and  Kropotkin,  of  the  military  and  noble 
caste  (like  Napoleon),  were  our  extreme  left. 
The  middle  and  upper  classes  are  the  revolu- 
tionary element  in  society  ;  the  proletariat  is 
the  Conservative  element,  as  Disraeli  well 
knew.  Hyndman  and  his  Marxists,  Bakunin 
and  his  Anarchists,  would  not  accept  this 
situation  ;  they  persisted  in  believing  that  the 
proletariat  was  an  irresistible  mass  of  un- 
awakened  Felix  Pyats  and  Ouidas.  I  did 
accept  the  situation,  helped,  perhaps,  by  my 
inherited    instinct    for   anti-climax.     I    threw 


Bernard   Shaw 

Hyndman  over,  and  got  to  work  with  Sydney 
Webb  and  the  rest  to  place  Socialism  on  a 
respectable  bourgeois  footing  :  hence  Fabian- 
ism.^ 

<S.t  this  time  Socialism  in  England  was  be- 
ginning to  have  a  separate  consciousness — it 
was,  in  fact,  becoming  self-conscious.  Hitherto 
there  had  been  no  strict  line  of  demarcation 
between  Socialism  and  Anarchism,  to  say  no- 
thing of  the  niceties  dividing  Communism 
and  Collectivism.  The  whole  revolutionary 
thought  of  the  period  was  a  turbulent  and  un- 
certain chaos  of  Utopian  dreams  and  crude 
economics,  mixed  up  with  morals  as  wild  as 
they  were  exalted,  and  uttered  with  the  flam- 
boyant decorations  of  an  emotionalism  that 
looked  upon  the  consummation  of  the  Socialist 
state  as  a  thing  of  a  few  years.  England  was 
at  last  genuinely  affected  by  the  energy  of  con- 
tinental Socialism.  The  Chartism  of  forty 
years  back  was  being  re-born,  not  as  Chartism, 
which  had  been  more  or  less  effectively  ab- 
sorbed by  Radicalism,  but  as  something  as  old, 
yet    new    to    our    limited    capacities    for    the 

I02 


The   Fabian 

absorption  of  new  ideas.  English  Socialism 
of  the  early  eighties  was  composed  of  little 
more  than  the  Communist  Manifesto  of  Marx 
and  Engels,  which  was  first  issued  in  1847. 
The  atmosphere,  however,  was  quick  with  new 
hope,  and  a  group  of  men  of  imagination  and 
ability  was  attracted  to  the  movement^.  Among 
these  were  H.  M.  Hyndman,  William^Morris, 
Belfort  Bax, Herbert  Burrows,  H.  H. Champion, 
John  Burns,  J.  L.  Joynes,  H.  Quelch,  who, 
with  Annie  Besant,  Sydney  Webb,  and  Bernard 
Shaw,  were  the  founders  of  English  Socialisro^ 
They  gave  the  insurrectionary  communism  of 
the  Continent  not  merely  a  local  habitation  and 
a  name  in  our  midst,  but  transformed  its  exter- 
nals so  as  to  appeal  the  less  shockingly  to  the 
traditional  susceptibilities  of  our  insular  pre- 
judices. They  succeeded  in  turning  their  some- 
what nebulous  material  into  a  moral  and 
political  machine  of  surprising  and  incalculable 
power. 

The  Fabian  Society  was  the  outcome  of  the 
natural  conflict  of  ideas  and  methods  of  those 
early  days  of  Socialist  organisation.    Hitherto 

103 


Bernard   Shaw 

the  constructive  idea  had  received  little  atten- 
tion ;  the  Fabians  conceived  the  policy  of 
turning  the  stream  of  Socialist  thought  into 
the  ordinary  channels  of  our  constitutional 
methods,  and,  instead  of  eternally  preaching  a 
doctrine  from  the  house-tops,  giving  the 
machinery  of  legislation  a  practical  collectivist 
bias.  \  But  this  idea  was  by  no  means  so  clear 
as  it  eventually  became  when  the  Fabians  were 
the  first  heretics  to  the  "all  or  nothing" 
Socialism  of  1883^ 

Th«;;actual  formation  of  the  Fabian  Society 
came  ab^t  as  the  outcome  of  a  break,  not  so 
much  with  revolutionary  Socialism,  as  with 
a  kind  of  transcendental  Individualis'hij^  This 
was  introduced  into  England  by'^homas 
Davidson,  brother  of  Morrison  Davidson,  who 
had  spent  some  time  in  Italy,  where  he  came 
under  the  influence  of  the  ethical  philosophy 
of  Rosmini,  an  influence  which  bore  fruit 
in  the  form  of  the  Fellowship  of  the  New 
Life,  a  society  for  the  propagation  of  ideal 
ethics,  formed  by  Davidson  in  London. 
Meetings  were  held  in  his  rooms  at  Chelsea 

104 


The   Fabian 

from  1 88 1  to  1883,  and  a  periodical  called 
Seedtimey  which  lived  for  eight  years,  was  issued. 
The  need  for  larger  accommodation  caused 
the  Fellowship  to  move  its  quarters  to  the 
rooms  of  Edward  R.  Pease,  one  of  its  mem- 
bers, at  17  Osnaburgh  Street,  Regent's  Park. 
These  rooms  were  destined  to  see  the  birth 
of  the  Fabian  Society.  The  Davidson  process, 
which  Shaw  describes  as  "the  peaceful  re- 
generation of  the  race  by  the  cultivation  of 
perfection  of  individual  character,"  was  found 
wanting  by  the  more  Socialist  members  of  the 
Fellowship,  and  they  agreed  to  separate.  Those 
who  left  the  Fellowship  then  were  the  first 
Fabians.  Among  those  who  were  present 
at  the  meeting  which  decided  to  form  a  society 
whose  aim  should  be  the  dissemination  of 
ideas  towards  the  regeneration  of  humanity  by 
the  capture  of  the  legislative  machinery  of  the 
state,  and  its  administration  for  the  common 
good,  were  Frank  Podmore,  Edward  R.  Pease, 
Havelock  Ellis,  Percival  Chubb,  Dr.  Burns  Gib- 
son, H.  H.  Champion,  William  Clarke,  Hubert 
Bland,  Rev.  G.  W.  Allen,  and  W.  J.  Jupp. 

105 


Bernard  Shaw 

The  first  Fabian  secretary  was  F.  Keddell, 
a  post  occupied  by  him  until  1885,  when  he 
was  succeeded  by  Edward  R.  Pease.  The 
secretaryship  of  the  society  has  been  in  his 
able  hands  continuously  since  1890;  before 
this  date  there  was  a  break  of  a  year  or  so, 
owing  to  unavoidable  absence  from  London, 
when  Sydney  Olivier  (now  Sir  Sydney  Olivier, 
K.C.M.G.,  Governor  of  Jamaica)  acted  in  his 
place.  The  chief  conspirator  in  the  formation 
of  the  Fabian  Society  seems  to  have  been  Mr. 
Frank  Podmore,  who  suggested  the  name 
"  Fabian,"  after  Fabius  Cunctator,  the  Roman 
Consul,  whose  memory  is  chiefly  preserved  in 
the  record  of  the  success  that  followed  his 
adoption  of  devious  and  prudential  tactics 
in  the  art  of  war,  and  he  invented  the  appro- 
priate quotation  which  appeared  in  inverted 
commas  on  the  title  cover  of  the  earlier 
Fabian  Tracts  : — 

"  For  the  right  moment  you  must  wait,  as 
Fabius  did  most  patiently  when  warring 
against  Hannibal,  though  many  censured  his 
delays  ;  but  when  the  time  comes  you  must 

106 


The  Fabian 

strike   hard,  as  Fablus   did,   or  your  waiting 
will  be  in  vain,  and  pointless." 

Gatherings  were  continued  in  the  rooms  of 
Mr.  Pease,  and  the  actual  meeting,  when  the 
Fabians  became  established  as  a  society,  was 
held  on  January  4th,  1884.  Bernard  Shaw 
did  not  join  until  some  eight  months  later;  he 
was  elected  to  membership  on  September  5th 
of  the  same  year.  He  was  on  the  point  of 
joining  the  Democratic  Federation  when,  he 
says,  "guided  by  no  discoverable  difference 
in  program  or  principles,  but  solely  by  an 
instinctive  feeling  that  the  Fabian  and  not  the 
Federation  would  attract  the  men  of  my  own 
bias  and  intellectual  habits  who  were  then 
ripening  for  the  work  that  lay  before  us,"  he 
thereupon  joined  the  organisation,  of  which  he 
is  still  a  member.  It  is  interesting  to  note 
that  immediately  upon  joining  the  society  he 
became  an  active  worker,  suggesting  lines  of 
action,  and  writing  tracts.  Of  these,  Fabian 
Tracts  Nos.  2  and  3,  which  are  no  longer  issued, 
were  his  work,  although  much  altered  by  the 
committee.     They    were    called,  A   Manifesto 

107 


Bernard   Shaw 

(1884),  ^J^d  To  Provident  Landlords  and  Capital- 
ists :  A  Suggestion  and  a  Warning  (1885). 

There  was  a  specific  Fabianism,  however, 
though  at  this  time  it  was  in  a  latent  state  ;  the 
very  choice  of  name  and  the  fact  that  it  attracted 
men  of  a  certain  type  of  mind  indicates  some 
governing  idea  apart  from  and  deeper  than 
that  of  class  distinction,  which  was  one  of  the 
more  obvious  differences  between  the  new  and 
the  older  organisations.  The  League  and  the 
Federation,  although  led  by  members  of  the 
middle  class,  were  always  proletarian  in  aim 
and  constitution,  whereas  the  Fabian  Society, 
though  open  to  all  classes,  was  of  a  decided 
bourgeois  bias  in  both  rank  and  file.  Later 
this  social  difference  made  propaganda  by 
means  of  constitutional  opportunism  and  per- 
meation a  hopeful  line  of  action.  At  first  the 
Fabian  Society  was  in  reality  a  body  of 
students  whose  one  aim  was  the  effective  ap- 
plication of  the  collectivist  idea  to  present 
affairs,  and  it  was  not  until  later  in  its  career 
that  permeation  became  a  conscious  factor  in 
the  science  of  theoretic  and  applied  sociology. 


The  Fabian 

Revolution  by  constitutional  means  is  a 
fundamental  Fabian  idea.  The  society  has 
never  encouraged  detached  revolutionism,  any 
more  than  it  has  advocated  or  condoned  in- 
surrectionism  ;  in  fact,  Fabians  have  always 
been  convinced  that  Socialism  would  be 
brought  about  without  the  Socialist  detaching 
himself  in  any  way  from  the  normal  course 
of  English  life.  Bernard  Shaw  has  always  up- 
held this  idea.  It  is  evident  in  his  invariable 
advice  to  the  ardent  young  Socialist  who 
wishes  to  do  something  for  the  cause.  *'  Be- 
come efficient  at  your  own  particular  trade 
or  profession,"  he  says,  "  and  then  tell  every 
one  you  are  a  Socialist." 

An  important  characteristic  of  the  Society 
is  the  fact  that  whilst  numbering  among  its 
members  many  of  the  most  able  sociologists 
living,  it  is  still  a  society  of  students  in  the 
sense  that  it  recognises  the  constant  need  for 
the  re-statement  of  its  ideas  in  the  light  of 
changing  social  conditions.  This  means  that  it 
not  only  seeks  by  devious  ways  to  have  its  ideas 
put  into  force,  but  that  it  seeks  to  discover  and 

109 


Bernard   Shaw 

institute  new  sociological  needs  and  tenden- 
cies, and  its  more  active  members  fall  roughly 
into  two  classes — the  men  of  ideas,  imagina- 
tive, philosophical,  and  scientific,  like  H.  G. 
Wells  and  Bernard  Shaw,  Sydney  Webb  and 
Edward  R.  Pease ;  and  the  practical  men, 
organisers,  members  of  Parliament,  and  muni- 
cipal councillors,  and  all  those  members  who 
do  social  service  up  and  down  the  land. 

But  in  certain  instances  these  two  classes 
are  united  in  the  same  individual.  This  is 
conspicuously  so  in  the  case  of  Sydney  Webb 
(and  in  this  reference  one  must  not  forget  Mrs. 
Sydney  Webb,  the  brilliant  partner  of  his  social 
work),  who  unites  the  duties  of  London  County 
Councillor  and  general  practical  adviser  to  all 
organisations  associated  with  labour  and  in- 
dustry, with  an  almost  incredible  power  of 
painstaking  research  into  the  origin  and  nature 
of  industrialism  and  the  genesis  and  history 
of  local  government.  And  in  Bernard  Shaw 
we  have  another  example  of  this  combination  ; 
but  here  it  is  with  the  philosophic  and  the 
practical,  which  last  had  ample  play  in  his  six 

no 


The  Fabian 

years'    service    as    Vestryman    and    Borough 
Councillor  of  St.  Pancras. 

The  Socialism  of  the  Fabian  Society  in  the 
past  has  been  economic.  Its  aim  is  the  re- 
organisation of  Society  on  a  basis  that  is  free 
from  the  limitations  imposed  upon  it  by  the 
private  ownership  of  land  and  industrial  capital, 
and  it  works  towards  the  vesting  of  these  in  the 
community  for  the  general  benefit.  More 
recently,  however,  the  Society  has  admitted 
the  philosophic  aspects  into  its  curriculum,  and 
by  means  of  a  Fabian  Arts  Group,  over  the 
initial  meeting  of  which  Bernard  Shaw  presided, 
it  is  extending  its  usefulness  by  the  study  of  the 
relations  of  art  and  philosophy  to  Socialism.^ 

1  Quite  recently  the  Fabian  Society  was  urged  to  recon- 
sider its  basis,  and  to  devise  ways  and  means  for  extending 
its  usefulness.  The  leader  of  what  became  a  reform  move- 
ment within  the  Society,  was  H.  G.  Wells.  He  was 
instrumental  in  having  a  special  committee  appointed  to  con- 
sider the  present  condition  and  future  work  of  the  Society. 
This  committee  eventually  issued  a  report,  to  which  the 
Executive  Committee  made  a  reply.  A  series  of  debates 
extending  over  many  meetings  followed,  in  which  H.  G. 
Wells  and  Bernard  Shaw  found  themselves  protagonists  of 
opposing  camps.  Shaw  was  elected  the  spokesman  of  the 
"  Old  Gang"  and  how  he  acquitted  himself  is  notable  Fabian 

III 


Bernard   Shaw 

/Bernard  Shaw's  contribution  to  the  economic 
airJl^of  the  Society  has  been  as  exponent  rather 
than  as  innovator,  but  his  exposition  of  Social- 
istic ideas  is  so  distinct  as  to  be  in  the  nature 
of  creati'b^.  Ruskin  was  the  first  to  humanise 
political  economy,  to  turn  it  from  a  dismal 
into  a  joyful  science  ;  Bernard  Shaw  has  gone 
a  step  further  by  making  it  appeal  to  common 
sense  in  a  manner  not  only  attractive  but 
absolutely  amusing.  It  is  not  a  matter  of 
popularising,  as  Robert  Blatchford  does,  by 
graphic  and  sincere  exposition  in  simple  words 
addressed  to  the  man  in  the  street,  but  a  witty, 
logical,  and  provocative  appeal  to  the  common 
sense  and  personal  interest  of  all  who  have 
the  latent  elements  of  thought.  It  is  in  effect 
political  economy  in  terms  of  inspired  common 
sense — inspired  from  both  practical,  philo- 
sophical, and  imaginative  sources. 

History,  specially  memorable  to  those  who  heard  his  mag- 
nificent fighting  speech  at  Exeter  Hall  on  14  December, 
1906.  But  although  Wells  was  out-manoeuvered  in  the 
debate  on  the  Report  of  the  Special  Committee  and  the 
Reply  of  the  Executive,  the  spirit  of  reform  inaugurated 
by  him  dominates  the  Society  and  is  already  creating  far- 
reaching  activities. 

112 


The  Fabian 

This  might  be  expected  in  a  play  with  a 
purpose,  though  it  is  not  always  to  be  relied 
upon  even  there.  But  one  does  not  usually 
anticipate  a  laugh  in  the  works  of  the  followers 
of  the  science  of  Adam  Smith,  John  Stuart 
Mill,  and  Karl  Marx.  The  effect  of  this 
hilarity  of  thought,  which  in  some  ways  is  a 
Fabian  characteristic,  has  been  similar  to  what 
Shaw  himself  records  of  the  Society.  "It 
was  at  this  period,"  he  says,  referring  to  a 
stage  in  its  growth,  "  that  we  contracted  the 
invaluable  habit  of  freely  laughing  at  ourselves 
which  has  always  distinguished  us,  and  which 
has  saved  us  from  becoming  hampered  by  the 
gushing  enthusiasts  who  mistake  their  own 
emotions  for  public  movements.  From  the 
first  such  people  fled  after  one  glance  at  us, 
declaring  that  we  were  not  serious." 

But  this  humoursome  peculiarity  has  not 
always  the  advantage,  for  whilst  ensuring  the 
favour  and  support  of  those  who  are  the  fortu- 
nate possessors  of  a  sense  of  humour  plus  a 
seriousness  of  thought  and  aim,  it  alienates 
not    only    those    who    "  mistake    their    own 


Bernard   Shaw 

emotions  for  public  movements"  who,  in  refer- 
ence to  an  author,  are  his  sentimental  parasites, 
but  those  more  useful  dull  persons  who  are 
none  the  less  earnest  and  in  some  instances 
even  able  in  purpose.  Many  of  these  by- 
reason  of  this  shortage  of  humour  are  forced 
into  the  numerous  band  of  duffers  who  see 
nothing  in  Shaw's  work  but  a  profusion  of 
brilliant  paradoxes  that  mean  nothing  and  lead 
nowhere.  But,  after  all,  it  does  not  need  a 
sense  of  humour  so  much  as  a  sense  of  honesty 
to  realise  the  opposite  to  this  conclusion,  and 
that  even  the  most  whimsical  utterance  in  the 
plays,  read  in  the  light  of  his  Fabian  essays, 
not  to  mention  his  philosophy,  leads  irre- 
sistibly to  a  conclusion  decidedly  the  opposite 
of  nowhere  and  nothing. 

<H^is  two  most  remarkable  contributions  to 
both  Fabianism  and  his  own  particular  method 
of  enunciating  economics  from  the  Socialist 
point  of  view,  and  as  special  propagandist 
efforts,  are  Socialism  for  Millionaires^  first  pub- 
lished in  the  Contemporary  Review  of  February, 
1896,  and  afterwards  (1901)  as  Fabian  Tract 

114 


The  Fabian 

No.  107  ;  and  The  Common  Sense  of  Municipal 
Trading,  issued  on  the  eve  of  the  L.C.C.  elec- 
tion in  190A  In  each  we  have,  with  greater 
certainty  than  in  any  other  of  his  actual 
Fabian  essays,  that  whimsical  and  arresting 
humour  applied  to  a  purely  matter-of-fact  and 
common-sense  view  of  modern  social  prob- 
lems, with  just  that  hint  of  a  deeper  phil- 
osophy behind,  which  raises  even  the  most 
trivial  and  aggravating  of  his  pronouncements 
from  mediocrity. 

The  re-issue  of  Socialism  for  Millionaires  was 
due  to  the  fact  of  what  he  calls  the  "  Millionaire 
Movement,"  which  is  the  outcome  of  the  "  Sub- 
stitution of  Combination  for  Competition  as  the 
Principle  of  Capitalism,"  having  produced  "  a 
new  crop  of  individual  fortunes  so  monstrous 
as  to  make  their  possessors  publicly  ridiculous." 
This  haclj-ecently  culminated  in  the  expressed 
opinion  of  Mr.  Andrew  Carnegie  that  no  man 
should  die  rich:-<-  The  essay  was  therefore  re- 
published with  Shavian  benevolence  as  a  guide 
to  the  voluntary  expropriation  of  the  absurd 
fortunes  of  this  "  millionaire  class,  a  small  but 

115 


Bernard   Shaw 

growing  one,  into  which  any  of  us  may  be 
thrown  to-morrow  by  the  accidents  of  com- 
merce." It  sets  forward  the  economics  of  the 
distribution  of  private  wealth,  and  it  is  the 
first  contribution  to  this  class  of  sociology. 
<^here  is  incalculable  harm  done  by  well-in- 
rentioned  plutocrats  who  "  unload "  their 
unearned  increment  unscientifically,  and  Shaw 
shows  how,  keeping  one  eye  on  science  and 
the  other  on  common  sense,  the  greatest 
good  can  be  done  to  society  by  even  those 
who  have  been  instruments  of  the  greatest 
harhfi^  The  method  is  scientific  in  so  far 
as  it  is  applied  in  deference  to  certain 
known  laws  of  social  life  and  in  reference  to 
an  organic  conception  of  society  as  a  whole. 
The  folly  of  excessive  incomes  is  contrasted 
with  the  possibilities  of  the  income  that  never 
exceeds  the  bounds  of  practical  and  wise  ex- 
penditure. "A  man  with  an  income  of 
twenty-five  pounds  a  year  can  multiply  his 
comfort  beyond  all  calculation  by  doubling  his 
income.  A  man  with  fifty  pounds  a  year  can 
at  least  quadruple  his  comfort  by  doubling  his 

ii6 


The  Fabian 

income.  Probably  up  to  even  tv/o  hundred 
and  fifty  pounds  a  year  doubled  income  means 
doubled  comfort.  After  that  the  increment  of 
comfort  grows  less  in  proportion  to  the  incre- 
ment of  income  until  a  point  is  reached  at 
which  the  victim  is  satiated  and  even  surfeited 
with  everything  that  money  can  procure." 
This  conclusion  is  undoubtedly  true,  as  some 
of  us  can  testify — at  all  events,  up  to  the 
second  and  third  doublings.  As  to  what 
occurs  in  the  increasing  burden  of  income,  we 
can  only  surmise  by  an  act  of  the  imagination, 
which,  after  all,  should  be  as  useful  in  socio- 
logy as  in  art.  But  Bernard  Shaw  does  not 
trust  us  in  this  respect ;  he  supplies  us,  in  a 
characteristic  and  whimsically  true  passage, 
with  a  picture  of  the  incongruousness  of  the 
over-rich  : 

"  What  can  the  wretched  millionaire  do  that 
needs  a  million  ?  Does  he  want  a  fleet  of 
yachts,  a  Rotten  Row  full  of  carriages,  an 
army  of  servants,  a  whole  city  of  town  houses, 
or  a  continent  for  a  game  preserve  ?  Can  he 
attend  more  than  one  theatre  in  one  evening, 

H  117 


^f^iVBj^ljy  j 


Bernard  Shaw 

or  wear  more  than  one  suit  at  a  time,  or 
digest  more  meals  than  his  butler  ?  Is  it  a 
luxury  to  have  more  money  to  take  care  of, 
more  begging-letters  to  read,  and  to  be  cut  off 
from  those  delicious  Alnaschar  dreams  in  which 
the  poor  man,  sitting  down  to  consider  what 
he  will  do  in  the  always  possible  event  of 
some  unknown  relative  leaving  him  a  fortune, 
forgets  his  privation  ?  And  yet  there  is  no 
sympathy  for  this  hidden  sorrow  of  plutocracy. 
The  poor  alone  are  pitied.  Societies  spring  up 
in  all  directions  to  relieve  all  sorts  of  com- 
paratively happy  people,  from  discharged 
prisoners  in  the  first  rapture  of  their  regained 
liberty  to  children  revelling  in  the  luxury  of 
an  unlimited  appetite  ;  but  no  hand  is  stretched 
out  to  the  millionaire,  except  to  beg." 

Thei^gative  rules  for  millionaires  are  :  (i) 
Don't  leave  more  than  enough  for  a  fair  start 
in  life  to  your  children.  (2)  Don't  give 
alms.  Providing  for  families  and  giving  alms 
are  one  and  the  same  thing.  "  From  the  point 
of  view  of  society,  it  does  not  matter  a  straw 
whether  the  person  relieved  of  the  necessity  of 

118 


The   Fabian 

working  for  his  living  by  a  millionaire's  bounty, 
be  his  son,  his  daughter's  husband,  or  merely 
a  casual  beggar/'^This  is,  of  course,  a  simple 
law  of  economics  that  no  society  but  one  pro- 
foundly indifferent  to  such  things  would  fail  to 
have  put  in  practice.  Any  arrangement  of 
capital  that  makes  it  possible  to  increase  the 
power  of  consumption  whilst  either  reducing 
that  of  production  or  leaving  it  in  statu  quo 
must  ultimately  act  injuriously  on  the  society. 
As  to  the  negation  of  almsgiving,  had  we 
not  examples  of  tha^ntire  failure  of  charitable 
organisations  to  do  anything  more  than  re- 
duce poverty  in  one  place  while  its  augmenta- 
tion went  on  in  another  ?  Sisyphus-like  they 
rolled  their  poverty  boulder  to  the  hill-top  of 
charity  only  to  have  it  perpetually  rolled 
down  again  by  natural  economic  laws  ;  or,  in 
other  words,  they  found  that  the  increase  of 
their  charitable  endeavour  was  parallel  with  an 
increase  in  poor-law  returns,  unemployment, 
pauperism,  starvation,  physical  decay,  and 
social  degeneration.  In  this  essay  Shaw  shows 
how  absurd  it  is  to  "  help  "  beggaf5>    As  a 

119 


Bernard  Shaw 

matter  of  fact,Mhe  genuine  beggar  cannot  be 
helped  without  danger  to  the  social  system  ; 
he  points  out  rightly  that  this  class  is  different 
from  "  the  deserving  poor."  They  are  "  people 
who  have  discovered  that  it  is  possible  to  live 
by  simply  impudently  asking  for  what  they 
want  until  they  get  it,"  and  true  almsgiving  is 
inseparably  linked  with  this  class,  which  is  just 
as  parasitic  as  the  idle  rich — the  folk  who  live 
on  rent  and  dividends^:> 

The  whole  art  of  millionaire  unloading  is 
contained  in  this  rule :  "The  millionaire  is  never 
to  do  anything  for  the  public,  any  more  than 
for  an  individual,  that  the  public  will  do 
(because  it  must)  for  itself  without  his  inter- 
vention." This,  of  course,  would  rule  out 
of  countenance  such  gigantic  schemes  of  library 
distribution  as  those  practised  by  Mr.  Carnegie, 
although  the  matter  is  here  compromised  by 
non-endowment  and  the  insistence  on  rate 
support  of  the  library  presented  by  the 
millionaire.  However,  this  does  not  place 
Mr.  Carnegie's  munificence  on  a  properly  pro- 
gressive basis,  for  apart  from  the  fact  that  it 

I20 


The  Fabian 

stimulates  an  altogether  demoralising  spirit 
of  importunity  on  the  part  of  the  privately 
minded  members  of  our  municipal  councils, 
it  destroys  the  possibility  of  citizenship  that 
should  aim  at  communal  independence — es- 
pecially in  cases  such  as  this  where  the  statutes 
make  provision  for  public  libraries.  Those 
who  want  books  should  buy  them  either  col- 
lectively through  the  rates  or  privately — they 
should  not  beg,  even  from  a  millionaire. 

So  it  will  be  seen  that  both  the  methods 
adopted  by  Mr.  Carnegie  and  the  late  Cecil 
Rhodes,  whilst  sound  in  their  recognition  of 
the  principle  that  it  is  immoral  for  a  man 
either  to  die  rich  or  bequeath  his  wealth  at  the 
instigation  of  the  accidents  of  consanguinity, 
are  equally  unsound  in  aiding  institutions  that 
in  one  instance  (libraries)  are  empowered 
by  the  state  to  help  themselves,  and  in  the 
other  (colleges)  ought  to  have  that  power  from 
the  state  by  natural  right.  The  principle  to  be 
established  is  that  charity  is  the  greatest  hind- 
rance to  the  perfection  of  the  state  machine. 
/Bernard  Shaw  would  welcome  any  financial 

121 


Bernard  Shaw 

aid  for  the  purpose,  not  of  supplanting 
public  machinery,  but  for  setting  public 
machinery  in  motion  :>*  it  is  the  struggles  of 
society  to  adapt  itself  to  the  new  conditions 
which  every  decade  of  modern  industrial 
development  springs  on  us  that  need  help." 
And  any  club  or  society  that  devotes  itself  to 
aiding  the  larger  social  organism  towards 
these  new  conditions  is  worthy  of  help — any 
society  that  is  in  the  nature  of  a  Vigilance 
Committee  such  as  the  National  Society  for 
the  Prevention  of  Cruelty  to  Children,  the 
Commons  Preservation  Society,  or,  in  his  own 
words,  "any  propagandist  society  which  knows 
how  to  handle  money  intelligently  and  which 
is  making  a  contribution  to  current  thought, 
whether  Christian  or  Pagan,  Liberal  or  Con- 
servative, Socialist  or  Individualist,  scientific 
or  humanitarian,  physical  or  metaphysical." 

The  concluding  formula  of  this  suggestive 
tract  is,"'^S^ever  give  the  people  anything  they 
want,  give  them  something  they  ought  to 
want  and  don't.^  There  is  no  real  excuse  for 
millionaires  who  have  read  this  tract — and  for 


122 


The  Fabian 

the  financially  incumbrous  it  is  a  revelation  in 
the  economics  of  rent  and  interest  and  the 
public  idea  in  relation  to  wealth,  apart  from 
its  excellence  as  an  essay  in  the  wisdom  of 
spending. 

In  the  Common  Sense  of  Municipal  Trading, 
Bernard  Shaw  has  presented  a  view  of  this 
important  question,  which  is  not  over-stated 
in  the  title.  The  opponents  of  the  recent 
municipal  awakening,  opponents  be  it  noted 
generally  drawn  from  the  wealthy  class  asso- 
ciated with  finance,  trusts,  and  limited  com- 
panies, and  the  immediate  dependents  and 
parasites  of  this  class,  have  so  bewildered  an 
unthinking  public  with  cleverly  manipulated 
figures  and  industriously  perverted  facts,  that 
that  large  and  long-suffering  body  might 
almost  be  forgiven  for  acting  against  its 
interests  and  voting  for  the  anti-municipal 
nominees.  Therefore,  a  statement  of  the 
common  sense  of  the  question  had  become 
an  urgent  necessity ;  and  were  the  public 
repute  for  this  article  not  a  myth  it  would 
read  this  book  with  a  peculiarly  appreciative 

123 


Bernard  Shaw 

relish.  It  is  a  statement  of  the  case  for 
municipal  trading  not  in  terms  of  figures  and 
statistics,  but  in  terms  of  life,  for,  he  says 
with  irrefutable  truth,  *'  the  balance-sheet  of 
a  city's  welfare  cannot  be  stated  in  figures. 
Counters  of  a  much  more  spiritual  kind  are 
needed,  and  some  imagination  and  conscience 
to  add  them  up  as  well."  The  treatise  is  not 
alone  the  outcome  of  theories,  but  of  Bernard 
Shaw's  six  years'  practical  experience  in  the  com- 
mittee rooms  of  St.  Pancras  Vestry  and  Borough 
Council,  so  that  even  the  most  violent  advocates 
of  the  practical  may  not  read  in  vain. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  it  is  to  the  munici- 
palities we  must  now  turn  for  the  affairs  of  the 
land  that  have  a  more  intimate  bearing  upon 
our  daily  lives.  The  Central  Parliament  at 
Westminster  must  inevitably  become  more  and 
more  the  director  and  arbiter  of  imperial  cir- 
cumstance clustered  around  by  numerous  Local 
Parliaments,  growing  in  size  rather  than  num- 
bers, who  will  look  to  Westminster  with  a 
perpetual  demand  for  fuller  powers.  The 
citizens  who  know  their  own   business,  who 

124 


The  Fabian 

are  not  entirely  tradition  bound,  are  those 
who  know  this  and  work  to  realise  it.  They 
have  realised,  as  Bernard  Shaw  has,  that  the 
great  parliamentary  battle  of  the  near  future 
is  to  be  between  the  pros  and  cons  of  what  is 
miscalled  municipal  trading — for  the  thing 
that  is  meant  by  these  words  is  not,  properly 
speaking,  trading  at  all.  It  is  service,  public 
service,  the  organisation  and  administration 
of  the  people's  affairs,  so  as  to  reduce  waste 
to  a  minimum,  and  by  giving  a  wide  margin  of 
convenience  and  health  to  make  the  maximum 
of  public  growth  possible. 

It  is  the  communalisation  of  utility  and 
ability  that  is  involved  in  the  question  of 
municipal  service,  and  Shaw  says  without  ex- 
aggeration that "  it  is  conceivable  by  a  sensible 
man  that  the  political  struggle  over  it  may 
come  nearer  to  a  civil  war  than  any  issue 
raised  in  England  since  the  Reform  Bill  of 
1832."  He  adds  that  "it  will  certainly  not 
be  decided  by  argument  alone.  Private  property 
will  not  yield  its  most  fertile  provinces  to  the 
logic  of  Socialism ;  nor  will  the  sweated  labour, 

125 


Bernard  Shaw 

or  the  rack-rented  and  rack-rated  City  shop- 
keeper or  professional  man  refrain,  on  abstract 
Individualist  grounds,  from  an  obvious  way 
of  lightening  his  burden."  Perhaps  here, 
however,  whilst  not  supposing  for  a  moment 
that  the  great  monopolies  in  private  property 
can  be  expropriated  by  entirely  peaceful  means, 
the  growth  of  municipal  administration  may 
be  continued  by  the  necessity  created  out  of 
its  own  impetus. 

For  instance,  the  social  system  is  so  knit 
together,  in  spite  of  the  jarring  sectarianism  of 
competitive  commerce,  that  any  one  private 
field  of  public  exploitation  can  never  become  a 
machine  of  public  service  without  implicating 
in  numerous  ways  all  its  associated  concerns. 
Again,  the  necessity  of  national  defence  makes 
a  state-owned  navy  necessary,  and  the  coaling 
of  that  navy  suggests  state- owned  mines.  In 
the  case  of  private  combinations,  whose  aim  is 
the  eradication  of  the  waste  of  competition, 
they  begin  by  manufacturing,  say,  soap,  and 
end  by  making  all  the  accessories  of  the  manu- 
facture  and    distribution  of  soap,  as  well  as 

126 


The   Fabian 

spreading  into  fresh  industries  by  the  utilisa- 
tion of  by-products  and  the  accumulation  of 
profits,  such  as,  in  the  former  case,  glycerine, 
which  in  a  small  soap  concern  would  be  dele- 
gated to  a  glycerine  factor  or  allowed  to  run 
to  waste.  Your  soap-maker  not  only  becomes 
his  own  printer,  box-maker,  ship-owner,  car- 
rier, etc.,  but  the  centralisation  of  his  concern 
makes  him  town-owner,  as  at  Port  Sunlight, 
where  Messrs.  Lever  Bros,  have  built  a  model 
village  for  the  habitation  of  their  workers. 
So  in  this  way  the  "  peaceful  penetration  "  of 
the  sacred  realm  of  Private  Property  will  be 
continued  for  many  years  to  come.  It  will 
grow  like  a  snowball,  making  a  larger  and 
accumulating  service  with  each  revolution. 

The  impression  left  after  reading  The  Common 
Sense  of  Municipal  Trading  is  not  the  acquies- 
cent wonder  experienced  after  an  excursion 
into  the  realms  of  the  Utopists,  but  of  amaze- 
ment at  the  possible  existence,  which  one  begins 
to  doubt,  of  any  opponents  of  municipalisa- 
tion.  There  is  a  sweet  reasonableness  about  it 
all,  an  irresistible  logic  that  should  convince 

127 


Bernard   Shaw 

even  those  who  have  something  to  lose  by  the 
idea  of  municipal  service  being  pushed  to  its 
logical  conclusion,  namely,  the  rich.  Whilst 
not  lacking  in  brightness  there  are  fewer  tread- 
on-the-tail-of-my-coat  Shawisms  in  this  book 
than  in  his  others,  yet  there  are  many  instances 
of  that  truth  of  paradox  which  only  one  who 
is  not  standing  on  his  head  to  attract  attention 
could  command.  The  first  sentence  in  the 
following  extract  is  paradoxical  enough  in 
the  light  of  public  opinion,  but  in  the  economic 
light  that  follows  it  assumes  an  air  of  common 
sense  worthy  of  its  cause. 

"  The  truth  about  private  enterprise  is  that 
it  is  not  enterprising  enough  for  modern 
public  needs.  It  will  not  start  a  new  system 
until  it  is  forced  to  scrap  the  old  one.  And 
the  reason — one  that  no  profusion  of  technical 
education  will  wholly  remove — is  that  only  a 
fraction  of  the  public  benefit  of  industrial 
enterprise  is  commercially  appropriable  by  it. 
It  will  not  risk  colossal  capitals,  with  the  cer- 
tainty that  it  must  do  enormous  service  to  the 
public  and  create  a  prodigious  unearned  incre- 


The  Fabian 

ment  for  the  ground  landlords  before  it  can 
touch  a  farthing  dividend ;  and  therefore, 
however  crying  the  public  need  may  be,  if  the 
municipalities  will  not  move  in  the  matter, 
nothing  is  done  until  millionaires  begin  to 
loathe  this  superfluity  and  become  restless  as 
to  its  investment  ;  until  railways  are  pro- 
moted merely  to  buy  tubes  from  Steel  Trusts, 
and  monster  hotels  floated,  after  the  usual 
three  liquidations,  to  buy  tables  and  carpets 
from  furniture  companies.  And  even  then 
v/hat  is  done  is  only  enough  to  show  that  it 
should  have  been  done  fifty  years  sooner,  and 
might  even  have  been  done  commercially  but 
for  the  fatal,  though  inevitable,  commercial 
habit  of  mind  which  must  consider  only  the 
dividend  which  it  can  grasp  and  not  the  social 
benefit  that  it  must  share  with  its  neighbours." 
The  direct  purpose  of  the  book  is  to  induce 
the  public  to  see  that  it  would  be  wiser  for 
them  to  use  all  the  channels  of  social  benefit/ 
for  social  rather  than  private,  for  communal 
rather  than  commercial  ends.  It  should  open! 
the  eyes  of  the  people  who  read  the  newspapers! 

129 


Bernard   Shaw 

to  the  absurdity  of  calling  expenditure  on 
municipal  services  such  as  gas,  water,  tramways, 
and  other  social  benefits,  municipal  debt.  These 
things  are  not  debts,  but  the  reverse  ;  the 
only  real  municipal  debts  are  degradation  of 
life  and  limitation  of  the  healthy  aspirations 
of  the  human  soul  to  worthy  endeavour. 
These  worst  debts  of  all  are  forced  upon  the 
municipality  by  the  very  individuals  who 
prate  most  of  municipal  indebtedness.  The 
opponents  of  organised  labour  find  a  margin 
of  surplus  labour  a  constant  deterrent  to  the 
pursuit  of  higher  wages  and  grow  wealthy  on 
casual  labour  that  must  by  its  very  nature 
degenerate  into  rate-subsidised  human  wrecks. 
For,  says  Shaw  :  "  No  human  being,  however 
solid  his  character  and  careful  his  training,  can 
loaf  at  the  street  corner  waiting  to  be  picked 
up  for  a  chance  job  without  becoming  more 
or  less  of  a  vagabond."  It  is  the  creators  of 
this  degenerate  type  of  humanity  who  cause 
the  high  rates  which  they  use  as  a  bogey  to 
scare  municipalisers.  The  poor  rate  is  largely 
a   levy    imposed   upon    the   majority    of  the 

130 


The  Fabian 

citizens  in  support  of  the  veterans  of  industry 
who  are  derelict  because  of  the  dividends  they 
have  helped  to  make  having  gone  into  other 
pockets  than  their  own. 

Shaw  has  a  profound  grip  of  the  economics 
of  drudgery  and  all  those  mean  and  sordid 
things  that  are  so  evident  in  our  cities.  He 
does  not  speak  in  this  book  with  the  heat  of  an 
enraged  prophet,  he  is  no  Isaiah,  not  even  a 
Lassalle  ;  he  speaks  rather  as  one  who  is  out  of 
patience  with  the  mess  of  modern  commerce  and 
with  something  bordering  on  contempt  for  the 
people — workers  as  well  as  capitalists — who 
uphold  it.  He  would  not  shatter  it  to  bits 
and  then  remould  it  nearer  to  his  heart's 
desire,  but  he  would  remould  it  nearer  to  his 
heart's  desire  along  the  line  of  a  sane  and 
common-sense  curve  of  social  endeavour. 

But  Shaw  is  not  a  Utopist  in  the  sense  of  one 
having  a  cut-and-dried  Socialistic  state  ready 
to  supplant  the  present  order  of  affairs.  He 
has  not  even  interpreted  the  Socialist  idea  in 
terms  of  imaginative  science  as  H.  G.  Wells  has 
done  in  A  Modem  Utopia.     In  fact,  he  has  not 

131 


Bernard  Shaw 

gone  so  far  in  speculative  sociology  as  Wells 
did  in  Mankind  in  the  Making;  and  at  one 
time,  at  least,  he  was  indifferent  to  such 
imaginings.  In  December,  1896,  he  was  an- 
nounced to  lecture  at  Kelmscott  House, 
Hammersmith,  on  "What  Socialism  will  be 
like,"  and  the  following  passage  from  the  report 
of  his  opening  remarks  will  bear  this  out  : — 

"  My  lecture  will  be  very  short.  It  consists 
of  three  words — /  dont  know.  Having  de- 
livered it,  by  way  of  opening  a  discussion, 
I  will  proceed  to  make  a  few  remarks.  The 
first  thing  that  strikes  one  in  discussing  the 
matter  with  a  Socialist — if  you  have  a  critical 
habit  of  mind,  as  I  have,  professionally — is 
the  superstitious  resemblance  of  the  notion 
your  ordinary  Socialist  has  of  what  Socialism 
will  be  like  to  the  good  old  idea  of  what 
heaven  will  be  like !  If  you  suggest  that 
under  Socialism  anybody  will  pay  rent  or  re- 
ceive wages,  your  ideal  Socialist  jumps  on  you. 
If  I  venture  to  suggest  that  such  questions  as 
who  shall  be  allowed  to  live  on  Richmond 
Hill,  under  Socialism,  will  have  to  be  settled 

132 


*^  Of   THE 

UNIVERSITY 

s^LiFORB^^The  Fabian 


much  as  it  is  to-day,  by  seeing  who  will  pay 
most  to  live  there,  such  an  eminent  and  en- 
lightened Socialist  as  Mr.  Hyndman  immedi- 
ately loses  his  temper,  and  retorts  that  that  is 
a  disgusting  middle-class  idea."  i 

Although  there  is  a  decided  negation  of 
idealist  Utopianism  here,  Shaw  would  prob- 
ably take  more  seriously  the  Utopian  studies 
of  H.  G.  Wells,  which  were,  of  course,  un- 
known in  1896.  At  the  same  time,  there  is 
evidence  on  his  sociological  as  well  as  his 
philosophical  side  of  a  strong  objection  to  any 
elaborate  preconceptions  of  either  states  or  per- 
sons. His  idea  of  Socialism  is  not  of  a 
definite  state,  but  of  a  whole  range  of  ten- 
dencies towards  the  reshaping  of  the  social 
order  at  the  dictation  of  certain  feelings  and  a 
certain  line  of  thought,  which  develops  as  it 
proceeds.  It  may  by  the  tentative  nature  of 
its  actions  force  what  is  called  progress  to-day 
into  an  undreamed-of  line  of  action  to-morrow. 
He  would  take  circumstances  as  he  finds  them, 
applying  what  remedies  are  known, and  awaiting 

*  The  Labour  Leader^  19th  December,  1896. 


Bernard   Shaw 

the  resulting  circumstance  before  deciding  the 
next  step. 

At  the  same  time,  he  is  not  without  ideas  as 
to  what  might  be  the  possible  development  of, 
say,  the  wage  system,  or  what  will  stimulate 
initiative  and  govern  distribution  under  condi- 
tions wherein  each  unit  is  assured  of  the 
minimum  of  material  necessaries.  But  even 
here  he  is  free  from  any  of  the  usual  supersti- 
tions of  the  idealist.  His  Socialism  is  always 
too  much  in  the  company  of  practical  politics 
to  become  a  Shibboleth.  This  has  been  the 
cause  of  as  much  misunderstanding  of  his 
aims  among  Socialists  as  among  the  general 
public  and  the  dramatic  critics.  So  that  the 
uninitiated  are  delighted  to  have  their  impre- 
cations heartily  corroborated  by  the  very  folks 
whom  they  expected  to  agree  with  him.  But 
your  orthodox  Socialist  does  not  take  his  Shaw 
any  more  seriously  than  your  orthodox  Con- 
servative does.  Shaw  is  a  heretic,  for  instance, 
among  Socialists  who  still  uphold  the  Marxian 
Theory  of  Value,  and  the  Referendum.  And 
his  views  on  the  innumerable  details  of  pro- 

134 


The  Fabian 

cedure  and  tactics,  and  in  reference  to  what 
romantic  tradition  has  already  clustered  around 
the  Socialist  movement,  are  usually  provoca- 
tive of  controversy. 

His  practical  attitude  is  most  allied  to  that 
of  his  friend  Sydney  Webb,  who  is  undoubtedly 
the  best-informed  of  modern  men  on  all  ques- 
tions relating  to  Industrialism — its  cause  and 
cure — and  Local  Government.  The  influences 
of  this  sociologist's  calm  and  patient  research 
into  the  various  social  defects  of  the  day  and 
of  his  sane  and  practical  conclusions  for  reform 
are  traceable  throughout  Bernard  Shaw's  Social 
ism,  and  there  is  little  doubt  that  when  th 
history  of  the  Fabian  Society  is  written  it  will 
be  found  that  the  chief  instigators  of  its 
policy  and  tactics  were  these  two.  It  was  this 
rare  combination  of  practical  ability  with 
science  and  wit,  philosophy  and  imagination,  | 
that  must  have  gone  a  long  way  towards 
fostering  the  enthusiastic  collaboration  which 
has  been  conspicuous  in  the  life  of  the  Society. 

To  the  practical  science  of  Sydney  Webb, 
Bernard  Shaw  has  added  his  own  philosophy, 

135 


Bernard  Shaw 

which,  applied  to  politics,  takes  the  form  of 
a  denunciation  of  the  privately-minded  tem- 
perament as  against  the  social  consciousness  of 
the  individual.  His  main  idea  is  so  to  affect 
the  social  germ  in  the  human  constitution  as 
to  urge  it  into  an  endeavour  against  all  impedi- 
ments to  its  full  development.  One  of  his 
strongest  terms  of  contempt  is  that  of  "  hope- 
lessly private  person  " — that  numerous  he  who 
is  quite  content  to  value  everything  and  sacri- 
fice everything  to  personal  vanity  and  greed. 
It  is  such  content  as  this  he  would  ruffle,  not 
so  much  by  moving  the  private  persons  to  in- 
dividual reformation  as  by  creating  a  sufficient 
number  of  socially  conscious  beings  to  bring 
external  pressure  to  bear  on  the  others.  He 
has  little  faith  in  the  physician-heal-thyself 
moralists,  although  he  would  recognise  the 
necessity  for  a  fair  average  of  capacity  in  the 
rank  and  file  and  of  ability  at  the  head.  "  It 
was  easy,"  he  says,  "  for  Ruskin  to  lay  down 
the  rule  of  dying  rather  than  doing  unjustly  ; 
but  death  is  a  plain  thing  ;  justice  a  very  ob- 
scure thing."     That  is  why  Shaw  works   for 

136 


The  Fabian 

the  recognition  of  the  utility  of  a  properly 
organised  band  of  social  experts  whose  business 
it  is  to  seize  the  political  power  of  the  country 
and  to  use  it  for  the  adjustment  of  the  social 
balance,  and  to  create  a  broad  margin  of 
freedom  based  upon  a  social  minimum  estab- 
lished by  the  State  instead  of  at  the  dictation 
of  the  exigencies  of  property.  It  is  the 
arranging  of  a  pitched  battle  between  two 
armies — one  of  Private  Capital,  the  party 
of  social  stagnation,  and  the  other  of  Com- 
munal ideas,  the  party  of  social  growth. 

Two  factions  at  least  exist  in  every  state 
though  their  external  demands  change,  and 
their  fight  under  democracy  is  for  the  posses- 
sion of  the  majority  before  they  can  put  their 
ideas  into  force.  To-day  the  conflicting  forces 
are  capital  and  labour  and  the  remedial  ideas, 
individualism  and  collectivism.  Bernard  Shaw 
in  ranging  himself  on  the  side  of  the  collec- 
tivist  does  so  because  he  recognises  in  the 
state  established  by  the  individualist  nothing 
but  human  chaos — a  social  mess  ;  a  condition 
that  can  only  be  altered  by  administration  of 

137 


Bernard   Shaw 

the  machinery  of  legislation  in  such  a  way  as 
gradually  to  supplant  the  individualist  by  the 
collectivist  regime,  and  not  by  the  method 
"  of  those  foolish  misers  of  personal  righteous- 
ness who  think  they  can  dispose  of  social 
problems  by  bidding  reformers  of  society 
reform  themselves  first." 

Socialist  though  he  is,  he  does  not  hold  to 
any  views  that  would  give  the  democracy 
complete  control  of  its  affairs.  He  recog- 
nises the  fundamental  inequality  of  the  human 
egos  whilst  denying  the  necessity  for  eco- 
nomic inequality.  Democracy  he  calls  "  the 
last  refuge  of  cheap  misgovernment,"  and 
he  can  by  no  stretch  of  the  imagination  be 
reckoned  a  "government  of  the  people,  by 
the  people,  for  the  people "  reformer.  He 
would  certainly  have  the  people  governed  for 
the  people  but  by  those  who  know  not  only 
their  business  as  governors,  but  who  know 
and  are  determined  to  minister  to  the  welfare  of 
the  whole  state  with  no  other  class  distinction 
than  that  of  character.  The  aim  of  his  experts 
in  social  administration  would  be  the  organisa- 

'38 


The  Fabian 

tion  of  the  forces  of  social  life  in  such  a  way 
as  to  make  it  progressively  more  difficult  for 
the  present  dead  level  of  stupidity  and  medi- 
ocrity to  recur.  For  it  is  this  low  plane  of 
social  aspiration  and  desire  that  proves  the 
most  productive  hunting-ground  for  personally 
minded  demagogues,  and  Bernard  Shaw's  atti- 
tude towards  politics  is  that  of  one  who  will 
not  rest  until  he  has  made  the  people  conscious 
of  this.  "  It  annoys  me,"  he  says,  "  to  see 
people  comfortable  when  they  ought  to  be  un- 
comfortable ;  and  I  insist  on  making  them 
think  in  order  to  bring  them  to  conviction 
of  sin."  The  greatest  of  all  sins  is  poverty 
and  it  is  against  this  evil  that  he  would  have 
us  make  war.  "  The  crying  need  of  the 
nation,"  he  writes,  "  is  not  for  better  morals, 
cheaper  bread,  temperance,  liberty,  culture, 
redemption  of  fallen  sisters  and  erring  brothers, 
nor  the  grace,  love,  and  fellowship  of  the 
Trinity  ;  but  simply  for  enough  money.  And 
the  evil  to  be  attacked  is  not  sin,  suffering, 
greed,  priestcraft,  kingcraft,  demagogy,  mon- 
opoly, ignorance,  drink,  war,  pestilence,  nor 

139 


Bernard   Shaw 

any  other  of  the  scapegoats  which  reformers 
sacrifice,  but  simply  poverty."  Although 
he  looks  at  present  to  the  middle  classes  for 
the  provision  of  capable  leaders  in  this  crusade, 
his  aim  is  no  mere  class  aim,  at  least  not  in  so 
far  as  the  classes  are  constituted  to-day.  The 
middle  class  has  administrative  experience  and 
power,  in  its  modern  money-form  ;  these  he 
would  conduct  into  that  service  whose  first  aim 
is  the  abolition  of  poverty.  His  socialism  is  the 
conscious  nationalisation  of  human  service  in 
the  cause  of  a  fuller  and  deeper  life  ;  a  life  based 
on  power  and  ability  rather  than  on  weakness 
and  humility  ;  the  creation  of  a  state  in  which 
the  freedom  of  the  individual  shall  be  coinci- 
dent with  the  desire  for  the  greatest  social 
consciousness  and  the  largest  human  power. 
The  satisfaction  of  the  fundamental  material 
needs  of  the  democracy  is  the  first  step  in  this 
great  aim  ;  then  Shaw  looks  to  a  consciously 
directed  evolution  eliminating  from  society  that 
element,  which  he,  following  Swift,  stigmatises 
as  "  the  Yahoo,"  whose  vote  would  otherwise 
wreck  the  Commonwealth. 


140 


^r^^-e\xjj\^ 


BQeiackH  £vhiib 


Ill 

THE    PLAYWRIGHT 


The  claim  of  art  to  our  respect  must  stand  or  fall  with  the 
validity  of  its  pretension  to  cultivate  and  refine  our  senses  and 
faculties  until  seeing,  hearing,  feeling,  smelling,  and  tasting  be- 
come highly  conscious  and  critical  acts  with  us,  protesting 
vehemently  against  ugliness,  noise,  discordant  speech,  frowsy 
clothing,  and  foul  air,  and  taking  keen  interest  and  pleasure  in 
beauty,  in  music,  and  in  the  open  air,  besides  making  us  insist, 
as  necessary  for  comfort  and  decency,  on  clean,  wholesome, 
handsome  fabrics  to  wear,  and  utensils  of  fine  material  and 
elegant  workmanship  to  handle.  Further,  art  should  refine 
our  sense  of  character  and  conduct,  of  justice  and  sympathy, 
greatly  heightening  our  self-knowledge,  self-control,  precision 
of  action,  and  considerateness,  and  making  us  intolerant  of 
baseness,  cruelty,  injustice,  and  intellectual  superficiality  or 
vulgarity.  The  worthy  artist  or  craftsman  is  he  who  responds 
to  this  cultivation  of  the  physical  or  moral  senses  by  feeding 
them  with  pictures,  musical  compositions,  pleasant  houses  and 
gardens,  good  clothes  and  fine  implements,  poems,  fictions, 
essays,  and  dramas,  which  call  the  heightened  senses  and  en- 
nobled faculties  into  pleasurable  activity.  The  greatest  artist 
is  he  who  goes  a  step  beyond  the  demand,  and,  by  supplying 
works  of  a  higher  beauty  and  a  higher  interest  than  have  yet 
been  perceived,  succeeds,  after  a  brief  struggle  with  its  strange- 
ness, in  adding  this  fresh  extension  of  sense  to  the  heritage  of 
the  race.  This  is  why  we  value  art  :  this  is  why  we  feel 
that  the  iconoclast  and  the  Puritan  are  attacking  something 
made  holier,  by  solid  usefulness,  than  their  own  theories  of 
purity  ;  this  is  why  art  has  won  the  privileges  of  religion  ;  so 
that  London  shopkeepers  who  would  fiercely  resent  a  com- 
pulsory church  rate,  who  do  not  know  "Yankee  Doodle" 
from  "  God  save  the  Queen,"  and  who  are  more  interested  in 
the  photograph  of  the  latest  celebrity  than  in  the  Velasquez 
portraits  in  the  National  Gallery,  tamely  allow  the  London 
County  Council  to  spend  their  money  on  bands,  on  municipal 
art  inspectors,  and  on  plaster  casts  from  the  antique.  (In 
Libertyy  New  York,  27th  July,  1895.) 


Ill 

THE    PLAYWRIGHT 

^TT^HE  deduction  to  be  made  from  what  has 
■*■  been  written  in  the  foregoing  pages 
is  that  Bernard  Shaw  is  an  artist  with  a 
difference.  He  is  as  free  of  the  conventional 
artistic  scruples  as  he  is  of  the  popular  artistic 
follies.  He  is  an  artist  without  being  artistic, 
and  one  is  forced  into  the  belief  that  he  would 
drop  art  without  the  least  compunction  if  it 
did  not  aid  him  in  his  preaching.  Shaw  is 
a  preacher  of  philosophy  first,  an  artist  after- 
wards. But  although  he  has  no  scruples  about 
the  use  he  would  make  of  art,  he  does  not 
confuse  this  personal  matter  with  its  real 
nature.  Because  he  uses  art  to  disseminate 
a  philosophy,  he  does  not  commit  the  error  of 
the  moralist  who  announces  that  the  end  of 

143 


Bernard   Shaw 

art  is  to  teach.  Neither  does  he  yield  comfort 
to  the  aesthetically  afflicted  people  who  are 
under  the  equally  prevalent  illusion  that  art  is 
the  pursuit  of  beauty.  Beauty  is  no  more 
likely  to  occur  in  art  because  it  is  sought  than 
happiness  would  occur  in  life  for  a  like  reason. 
Both  beauty  and  happiness  are  the  incidentals 
of  true  action.  They  are  the  very  will-o'-the- 
wisps  of  any  definite  search. 

Art,  for  Shaw,  is  something  closely  related 
to  good  workmanship.  It  is  the  craftsmanship 
of  emotional  and  imaginative  conceptions, 
having,  in  so  far  as  its  expression  is  worthy 
and  thorough,  a  tendency  to  impel  those  that 
come  in  contact  with  it  towards  a  similar 
thoroughness  and  worthiness  of  the  faculties 
it  affects.  It  is  this  power  of  profoundly 
moving  people  which  revealed  to  Shaw  the 
immense  propaganda  value  of  art.  And  he 
has  deliberately  used  art  for  philosophical  and 
political  ends,  just  as  the  Church,  perhaps  less 
consciously,  used  art  for  religious  ends.  What 
art  there  is  in  his  work  stands  in  the  same 
perspective  to  the  vital  thought  of  to-day  as 

144 


The   Playwright 

the  Madonnas  and  holy  men  in  the  canvases 
of  the  old  masters  stood  in  relation  to  what 
was  vital  in  the  thought  of  their  day.  Or  to 
take  a  more  obvious  parallel,  the  Problem  Plays 
of  Bernard  Shaw,  and  for  the  matter  of  that 
of  Ibsen,  Tolstoy,  and  all  who  have  made 
problem  the  life  of  their  drama,  are  the  modern 
substitutes  for  the  Morality  and  Mystery  Plays 
of  the  past.  A  simple  age,  with  a  clear  and 
definite  outlook  upon  life,  based  upon  a  re- 
signed acquiescence  in  human  limitations  of 
perception  and  power,  naturally  produced  a 
drama  which  took  the  complexion  of  its  formal 
mind.  Hence  those  dramas  whose  action  was  a 
conflict  between  personified  vices  and  virtues, 
and  plays  that  were  an  exposition  of  a  simple 
faith  in  an  infinity  whose  nature  should  be  re- 
vealed as  a  reward  for  diligence  in  the  pursuit 
of  virtue. 

Modernity  is,  externally  at  all  events,  a  more 
complex  thing.  Formal  morals,  no  less  than 
formal  mystery,  have  given  place  to  philosophic 
doubt  on  the  one  hand  and  philosophic  specula- 
tion on  the  other.     We  breathe  a  problematic 

145 


Bernard   Shaw 

atmosphere.  We  are  no  longer  content  to 
whisper  "  mystery "  with  awe-stricken  rever- 
ence. The  mystery  of  life  is  becoming  irk- 
some, just  as  morality  has  become  a  prison. 
We  want  to  know  more  and  to  experience 
more.  The  air  is  quick  with  demands  for 
new  standards  and  for  fresh  valuations  of  the 
old  conceptions  of  right  and  wrong.  And  al- 
though the  infinite  has  not  capitulated  to  human 
need,  morality  is  on  the  eve  of  being  accounted 
finite.  So  the  vital  dramatic  need  of  the  day 
forces  this  state  of  problem  upon  the  stage.  In 
Ibsen  it  raises  the  curtain  upon  society  during 
typical  moments  of  actuality,  showing  us  the 
struggles  of  the  will  to  be  free.  The  drama 
of  Tolstoy  is  an  endeavour  to  breathe  into 
the  same  circumstance  a  new  and  passionate 
realisation  of  the  flagging  spirit  of  Christianity. 
And  in  Bernard  Shaw's  plays  we  have  personal 
volition  made  the  hero  of  a  drama  that  is  con- 
scious of  the  critical  values  of  its  own  action. 
His  characters  live  in  an  atmosphere  which  is 
constantly,  though  not  always  directly,  ex- 
pository. Shaw's  drama  is  the  only  consistently 

146 


The  Playwright 

religious  drama  of  the  day — it  is  as  relentless 
in  its  pursuit  of  an  exalted  idea  as  were  the 
ancient  Moralities  and  Mysteries.  But  his 
morality  does  not  appeal  from  the  standard  to 
the  man,  but  from  the  man  to  the  standard. 
His  moral  hero  does  not  say,  as  Goodness  and 
Virtue  said  in  the  old  plays,  "  Behold,  1  am 
good  because  I  am  like  goodness,"  but  "  Be- 
hold, I  am  good  because  I  am  myself."  And 
in  the  same  way  his  mystic  hero  is  no  longer 
before  a  God  whom  man  as  man  could  never 
see,  but  he  is  none  the  less  in  the  face  of 
mystery.  The  modern  mystic,  the  hero  of 
Shaw's  drama,  does  not  stand  before  a  veil 
which  hides  him  from  his  God,  he  stands  in 
the  midst  of  a  set  of  circumstances  which  are 
vital  with  the  energy  of  a  God  who  is  no 
longer  God  but  the  Life  Force,  and  his  whole 
aim  is  to  make  this  force  his  own.  He  is  no 
longer  a  child  asking  for  guidance,  but  an 
adult  demanding  his  rights,  and  acting  on  his 
own  responsibility.  His  inquisitiveness  will 
no  longer  be  satisfied  with  a  symbol — it  wants 
the  thing  itself 

147 


Bernard  Shaw 

The  attitude  of  such  a  hero,  who,  like  all 
heroes,  is  born  out  of  his  due  time,  must  be 
critical.  It  is  really  the  critical  side  of  Bernard 
Shaw  that  has  imposed  itself  most  obviously 
upon  his  characters.  Shaw's  most  obvious 
attitude  towards  society  is,  of  course,  critical, 
and  all  his  plays  are  criticisms.  They  are 
the  flower  and  consummation  of  the  famous 
Saturday  Review  articles  which  were  ostensibly 
dramatic  criticisms,  but  actually  criticisms  of 
life — a  function  continued  in  the  plays.  His 
most  constant  demand  was  for  the  restora- 
tion of  life  to  the  stage,  and  he  did  not 
spare  the  purveyors  of  those  substitutes 
for  reality,  which  then  and  now  almost  mo- 
nopolise the  theatre.  To  Bernard  Shaw  the 
theatre  is  the  temple,  if  not  of  the  Holy  Ghost, 
at  least  of  the  Holy  Spirit — the  soul  of  all 
that  is  responsible  and  vital  in  life.  It  is  a 
place  where  intellect  and  imagination  should 
interpret  life  to  men,  show  them  the  reality 
they  could  not  see  otherwise,  and  what  is 
more,  help  them  to  realise  their  own  relation- 
ship  to    that    reality.     His    whole    dramatic 

148 


The   Playwright 

criticism  is  a  demand  (and  his  plays  are  a 
contribution  to  its  fulfilment)  for  a  drama  that 
will  show  us  the  effect  of  genuine  human 
action,  and  not  of  action  frustrated  and  veiled 
at  every  point  by  traditional  conceptions  of 
conduct  or  artificial  acceptances  of  things  as 
they  are  supposed  to  be  and  not  as  they 
are. 

It  is  critical  because  it  is  alive.  It  is  the 
creation  not  merely  of  a  will  to  live,  but  of 
a  will  to  live  masterfully.  It  is  informed, 
incisive,  passionate,  and  quite  direct  for  those 
who  are  mentally  alert  enough  to  grasp  a  fresh 
view  of  ideas.  It  is  even  amusing  for  those 
who  have  not  this  faculty.  But  here  we  come 
in  contact  with  Shavian  humour,  which  has 
been  his  undoing  for  many  good  people.  The 
mind  that  has  been  fed  on  the  philosophy  of 
the  schoolmen,  that  has  been  engaged  with  the 
tedious  dullness  of  ideas  in  the  abstract,  can 
only  with  great  difficulty  understand  that 
philosophy  applied  to  life  and  expressed  by  art 
is  not  only  a  very  real  thing,  but  also  an  en- 
joyable thing.     Bernard  Shaw  has  the  gift  of 

K  149 


Bernard   Shaw 

expression  by  art  :  but  he  has  not  the  gift 
of  concealing  himself  in  his  art,  although  he 
manages  to  conceal  his  seriousness  from  the 
superficial  observer.  This  does  not  mean  that 
he  is  not  elusive.  From  one  point  of  view  he 
is  as  baffling  as  the  pea  under  the  conjurer's 
thimbles,  and  with  equally  logical  reasons. 
But  his  position  is  clear  in  the  mass  if  not  in 
every  detail.  It  is  just  these  logical  points 
that  may  be  at  the  root  of  all  the  trouble. 
Shaw's  mind  is  as  relentless  as  Euclid.  His 
inner  vision,  however,  is  quick  to  see  the 
humour  of  this  process,  and  as  the  logical 
mind  ploughs  through  conventions  and  tradi- 
tions, it  is  quick  to  seize  and  assert  itself.  So 
are  born  the  anti-climax  and  paradox  which  set 
theworld  laughing  and  the  wise  thinking  as  well. 
His  art  has  been  an  evolution  towards  a 
means  of  expression,  for  the  sake  of  propa- 
ganda, a  means  which  he  could  use  with  in- 
creasing freedom  and  effectiveness.  Students 
of  his  works  can  detect  this  development, 
through  the  essay  and  the  novel,  to  that 
propaganda    by   drama  which     has    at   length 

150 


The   Playwright 

impressed,  if  not  convinced,  his  contem- 
poraries. In  fact,  in  his  "  nonage,"  when  he 
produced  the  series  of  more  or  less  still-born 
novels,  these  products  bore  many  of  the 
characteristics  of  the  stage-play.  They  were 
largely  carried  on  by  means  of  dialogue 
interspersed  with  the  minimum  of  descrip- 
tion and  the  maximum  of  explanation — in 
which  last  he  has  always  been  a  master. 
These  novels  were  really  embryonic  stage- 
plays,  transitional  drama  ;  and  what  actually 
happened,  when  they  became  the  genuine 
article,  was  a  rearrangement  of  their  parts 
rather  than  an  alteration  in  their  matter.  The 
descriptions  became  the  scenario,  amplified 
before  each  act  in  the  printed  plays  ;  the  ex- 
planation became  the  now  famous  prefaces  and 
appendices,  or  else  formed  a  considerable 
and  increasing  part  of  the  dialogue  which, 
with  little  alteration,  conveyed  the  action  in 
much  the  same  way  as  it  did  in  the  novel — a 
form  of  art  which,  by  the  way,  has  been  called 
the  pocket  theatre. 

Perhaps  his  main  reason  for  adopting  the 

151 


Bernard  Shaw 

art  of  drama,  in  spite  of  what  he  has  said 
to  the  contrary,  was  the  obvious  one  of 
suitability  to  temperament.  For  every  good 
speaker  has  something  histrionic  in  his  com- 
position, and  the  drama  is  the  natural  art 
medium  for  its  expression.  But  with  this 
desire  for  a  medium  of  expression  that 
would  readily  impress  masses  of  people  with 
the  ideas  he  had  at  heart,  there  was  the 
dramatic  reformer's  wish  to  introduce  to  the 
British  stage  an  element  which  might  help  in 
restoring  a  desirable  high  seriousness  to  an  art 
which  is  gradually  replacing  the  Church  in  our 
religious  life.  As  a  dramatist  his  aim  was  to 
produce  plays  that  were  free  from  the  romantic 
conceptions  which  have  gathered  round  all  the 
important  functions  of  life  :  to  express  life 
realistically,  that  is,  from  his  own  point  of 
view.  He  has  laboured  to  create  a  drama,  not 
for  the  voluptuary,  nor  for  the  idle  amusement 
of  ordinary  people,  nor  for  the  delectation  of 
those  who  wish  to  see  recorded  obvious  inci- 
dents and  outworn  beliefs,  but  a  drama  that 
would  stimulate    the   intelligence    to  a  lively 

152 


The   Playwright 

concern  with  all  the  near  and  far  details  of 
social  life. 

The  stage  in  England,  save  for  the  bright 
interlude  of  the  Gilbert  and  Sullivan  comic- 
opera,  was  bathed  in  that  sentimental  glamour 
which  had  suffused  the  nineteenth  century 
from  its  dawn.  But  the  gush  of  tears  that 
heralded  its  birth  was  like  to  be  replaced  by  a 
cynicism  as  futile  if  not  quite  so  absurd.  It 
was  the  drama  of  useless  action  produced  with 
the  direct  purpose  of  exploiting  those  to  whom 
useful  action  was  impossible.  All  the  in- 
genuity of  clever  playwrights  and  cleverer 
actors  was  wasted  upon  an  interminable  series 
of  shallow  heroics  concerning  man's  desire  for 
woman,  relieved  by  those  equally  clever  and 
equally  futile  farcical  comedies  whose  capacity 
for  "still  running"  seemed  to  be  their  most 
laudable  feature. 

It  was  in  the  midst  of  the  self-complacency 
of  this  state  of  things  that  the  bombshell  of 
Ibsen  burst,  whose  reverberations  are  heard 
down  to  to-day.  These  were  renewed  quite 
recently  in  New  York,  when  pretty  much  the 

^53 


Bernard   Shaw 

same  hysterical  epithets  of  outraged  respect- 
ability were  hurled  at  Shaw  on  the  production 
of  Airs.  JVarrens  Profession,  as  were  hurled  at 
Ibsen  when  Ghosts  was  first  played  in  England 
by  the  Stage  Society.  The  critics  were  be- 
wildered, and  their  outraged  sense  of  decorum 
expressed  itself  in  such  a  tirade  of  indignant 
vituperation  as  never  before  filled  a  news- 
paper column.  Criticism  was  thrown  over- 
board, and  in  its  stead  we  had  a  wild  crescendo 
of  hysterical  abuse,  culminating  in  the  horri- 
fied cry  of  the  late  Mr.  Clement  Scott,  who, 
exhausting  the  vocabulary  of  journalistic 
wrath,  threw  down  his  burning  pen  after 
declaring  the  play  to  be  "an  open  drain." 
The  American  critics  were  hardly  less  abusive 
in  their  criticisms  of  Afrj.  JVarrens  Profession 
than  were  the  English  critics  of  Ghosts.  To 
one  it  was  "  a  most  designedly  useless  and 
prurient  comedy  "  ;  to  another  it  was  "  illumi- 
nated gangrene,"  whilst  a  third  cried  out  for 
disinfectants. 

It  must  be  recognised,  however,  that  in  spite 
of  its  absurdity,  such  criticism  has  a  basis  in  a 

154 


The    Plavwrio^ht 

o 

very  genuine  feeling,  which  15  rather  flamboy- 
antlj  voiced  by  the  critical  mentors  of  the  Press. 
It  is  the  feeling  of  a  very  large  class  in  a  countiy 
like  England,  where,  as  well  as  the  millioas  who 
have  to  put  up  with  conditions  of  poverty,  there 
are  millions,  ranging  from  the  moderatdy  com- 
fortable to  the  moderately  rich,  whose  habit 
of  perpetual  money-making  has  atn^^iied  or 
destroyed  the  habit  of  philosc^^c  thought, 
and  whose  more  or  less  certain  condition  of 
mechanical  comfort  and  luxury  strongly  re- 
sents any  criticism  either  derogatory  of  or 
dangerous  to  its  settled  habits.  This  is  the 
novel -reading,  newspaper-reading,  theatre- 
going  public,  and  most  commercially  successful 
literature  and  art  is  the  expression  of  its 
ideals  and  prejudices. 

This  is  really  the  dominant  class  in  English 
life  ;  it  is  more  class-conscious,  more  assertive 
both  morally  and  religiously,  more  energetic 
and  vigorous  in  pursuit  of  its  ambitions,  than 
is  either  the  class  below  or  the  class  above. 
It  is,  therefore,  all  the  more  difficult  to  move 
it  from  any  path  which  it  has  grown  to  con- 


ii 


Bernard  Shaw 

sider  worthy.  Its  beliefs  and  aspirations  are 
reflected  in  the  popular  art  of  the  day  ;  in  the 
literature  at  the  front  of  the  bookstalls  and 
"  in  demand  "  at  the  libraries  ;  in  the  plays 
with  long-date  bookings  for  the  stalls  and  long- 
petticoated  queues  for  the  pit  ;  in  the  pictures 
at  Burlington  House  that  are  honoured  with 
double-page  reproductions  in  the  weekly  illus- 
trated papers  ;  in  the  music  of  the  "  popular  " 
ballad  concert  and  the  "  light  "  opera.  And  in 
all  this  art  a  certain  standard,  what  its  devotees 
would  probably  call  "  tone,"  is  noticeable.  The 
more  humble  of  these  will  speak  of  it  as 
"  toney,"  and  the  more  authoritative  and  suc- 
cessful, but  none  the  less  incapable  of  a  sound 
opinion,  as  "  awfully  jolly,"  and  "  quite 
alright."  And  all  the  critics  in  the  pay  of 
this  middle  class  will  form  a  chorus,  chiming 
in  with  columns  of  approved  and  modulated 
cadenzas  in  the  key  of  *'  quite  alright." 

This  particular  tone  that  is  so  popular  is 
unerring  in  its  certainty.  It  has  a  little 
eternity  of  its  own,  with  a  compact  little  faith 
and  a  whole  hierarchy  of  priests  and  acolytes 

.j6 


The  Playwright 

attendant  upon  its  thought-proof  deities.  To 
these  deities,  of  course,  its  appeal  is  perpetual 
and  faithful — and  the  deities,  after  the  manner 
of  their  kind,  return  the  compliment  with 
mute  indifference  ;  till  in  the  end,  the 
devotees,  after  the  manner  of  devotees,  use 
their  deities  as  cloaks  to  hide  their  own  in- 
sufficiency. The  sanctity  of  the  family  and  of 
the  home,  for  instance,  has  become  a  protecting 
cloud  about  the  sentimental  tyrannies  of  hus- 
bands, wives,  and  children,  each  striving  to 
obtain  and  control  the  other,  and  resulting  in 
a  nebulous  and  shallow  indifference  to  every- 
thing but  externals  and  names.  Education, 
another  favoured  god,  becomes  the  systematic 
curriculum-cramming  of  the  young — the  in- 
tellectual slaughter  of  the  innocents — with 
what  result  ?  A  rising  generation  and  a  gene- 
ration just  risen  with  no  further  intelligence 
than  an  infinite  capacity  for  being  deceived. 
And  to  name  but  one  more — Democracy — 
the  people's  will  :  expressing  itself  for  ever  in 
the  faded  and  tawdry  pomp  and  circumstance 
of  an  outworn  feudalism  ;  lauding  its  free  and 

157 


Bernard   Shaw 

popular  institutions  to  the  skies,  and  using 
what  privileges  it  possesses,  grudgingly  or  not 
at  all,  at  the  dictation  of  the  stale  rhetoric  of 
politicians. 

The  relationship  of  Bernard  Shaw's  plays  to 
this  state  of  affairs  is  that  of  diagnosis.  They 
are  a  critical  and  dramatic  statement  of  social 
disease,  and  his  diagnosis  has  been  gradually 
freeing  itself  from  the  somewhat  crude  ex- 
pression of  the  views  of  a  social  physician  in 
the  early  plays,  whose  emphatic  sociology  was 
almost  too  much  for  the  dramatic  idea.  But 
in  his  latest  phase,  bare  sociology  is  rele- 
gated to  the  preface  or  appendix,  where  it 
takes  the  form  of  commentation  upon  the 
philosophic  contest  which  now  holds  his 
stage.  At  the  same  time,  his  plays  have 
always  been  of  the  one  category.  They  have 
always  enunciated  one  set  purpose,  and  what 
change  can  be  denoted  is  one  of  point  of  view 
rather  than  of  idea  ;  it  is  the  rapid  evolution 
of  a  mind  from  an  economic  to  a  philosophic 
interpretation  of  life.  It  exhibits  an  intelli- 
gence that  has  not  ceased  to  look  entirely  with 

158 


The   Playwright 

the  eye,  but  now  looks  through  the  eye  as 
well.  And  side  by  side  with  a  growing  sense 
of  the  mystic  element  in  life  his  powerful 
visual  sense  of  things  as  they  are  has  increased 
rather  than  otherwise. 

The  sociological  are  practically  the  un- 
pleasant plays,  though  The  Philanderer  is 
more  in  the  nature  of  an  anticipation  of 
the  later  method  of  expository  comedy. 
Mrs.  JVarrens  Profession  and  Widowers'  Houses 
are  pure  social  science  dramatised.  So  little 
of  the  later  philosophic  wit  do  they  con- 
tain, that  they  represent  Shaw's  nearest  ap- 
proach to  dullness.  Their  method  is  that 
of  pictorial  dialogue  exhibiting  certain  evils 
in  the  social  strata  by  making  an  intellectual 
appeal  to  the  emotions.  But  in  the  inter- 
mediate period,  which  is  anticipated  in  the 
character  of  Frank  in  Mrs.  JVarren's  Pro- 
fession^ the  method  is  that  of  illumination 
by  examples  in  action.  It  is  in  these  plays 
that  his  creative  faculty  has  given  most  de- 
light ;  in  the  pleasant  plays  Shaw  is  no 
longer    a    scientist,    his    philosophy    is    less 

159 


Bernard  Shaw 

aggressive  than  elsewhere.  Tou  Never  Can 
Tell  and  Candida  are  his  nearest  approaches 
to  impersonality  :  his  criticism  of  life  in 
these  plays  is  not  so  obvious.  It  is  there 
to  be  sure  ;  it  is  obvious  to  the  philo- 
sopher in  the  pit ;  but  the  only  impression 
made  on  the  average  mind  is  one  of  amused 
bewilderment,  pleasant  in  its  way,  with  just 
that  note  of  aggravation  caused  by  the  subtlety 
of  a  truth  of  whose  existence  one  is  half  in 
doubt. 

In  these  comedies  Shaw  has  achieved  crea- 
tion ;  he  has  made  out  of  words  beings  that 
have  a  distinct  existence,  beings  that  are  both 
the  embodiment  and  the  interpretation  of  an 
idea.  He  has  furthermore  created  a  type — 
something  that  is  representative.  The  leading 
characters  in  his  plays  have  that  distinction 
which  one  only  associates  with  the  work  of 
the  masters  of  literature.  They  are  Shavian, 
as  Mr.  Micawber  and  Mrs.  Gamp  are  Dicken- 
sian,  as  Sir  Willoughby  Patterne  and  Adrian 
Harley  are  Meredithian.  They  bear  the  tem- 
peramental  complexion   of  their  creator,  yet 

1 60 


The   Playwright 

live  independently  in  a  set  of  circumstances 
which  are  the  inevitable  outcome  of  their  every 
action. 

There  is  a  Shaw  Woman  and  a  Shaw  Man, 
or,  rather,  a  Shaw  Boy,  and  these  beings  have 
the  habit  of  all  effective  art  of  refusing  to  be 
talked  out  of  existence.  They  withstand  argu- 
ment as  nonchalantly  as  they  survive  conven- 
tional morals.  A  decade  of  puzzled  criticism 
leaves  Candida  and  Marchbanks  as  fresh  as 
when  they  first  met  the  rebukes  and  laughter 
of  the  public.  And  so  it  is  with  the  rest  of 
them,  with  Cleopatra  no  less  than  with  Louis 
Dubedat,  with  Anne  Whitefield,  with  Dick 
Dudgeon,  with  Frank  Gardner,  and  with 
Valentine,  and  Mrs.  Clandon's  incorrigible 
twins,  who  have  all  amused  and  bewildered, 
who  have  all  been  acclaimed  "  brilliant "  plus 
the  provisional  "but."  It  seems  to  be  the 
fate  of  Bernard  Shaw  to  make  men  laugh, 
and  even  in  many  cases  to  make  them  think, 
but  rarely  to  win  other  than  provisional 
appreciation.  Praise  of  him  is  generally 
qualified  with  this  protective  clause,  as  though 

i6i 


Bernard  Shaw 

both  critic  and  public  were  afraid  of  his 
"brilliance"  and  "cleverness"  committing 
them  to  an  acceptance  of  unorthodox  views. 

Shaw  has  stated  again  and  again  that  his 
object  is,  in  the  fullest  sense  of  a  misused 
word,  educational.  He  has  a  clear  vision 
of  social  rectitude,  and  society's  declensions 
fill  him  with  a  puritanical  wrath  which  ex- 
presses itself  in  critical  satire  and  expository 
declamation  woven  into  the  texture  of  his 
drama.  He  has  added  nothing  to  stage-craft, 
nor  to  the  art  of  play-writing,  save  a  definite 
and  original  point  of  view  and  the  faculty  of 
instilling  a  new  zeal  into  actors.  In  structure, 
the  plays  differ  very  little  from  the  ordinary 
play.  His  long  experience  as  a  dramatic  critic 
has  given  him  a  knowledge  of  all  the  tricks  of 
the  trade,  and  these  he  uses  with  the  greatest 
freedom.  What  he  has  severely  avoided  is  the 
sentimental  glamour  into  which  the  popular 
dramatist  plunges  every  action,  and  what  he  has 
aimed  at  doing  for  the  English  stage  is  what 
Ibsen,  Tolstoy,  Strindberg,  Brieux,  and  others 
have  done  for  the  European  stage,  that  is,  to 

162 


The   Playwright 

inaugurate  a  problem  drama  of  modern  ideas  ; 
to  exhibit  dramatically  the  vital  part  of  human 
beings  struggling  against  things  and  conditions, 
and  conceived  without  any  superstitious  defer- 
ence to  tradition.  For,  as  he  says,  "  Drama  is 
no  mere  setting  up  of  the  camera  to  nature  :  it 
is  the  presentation  in  parable  of  the  conflict 
between  Man's  will  and  his  environment  :  in 
a  word,  of  problem." 

But  the  most  aggressive  difference  between 
the  Shaw  play  and  that  of  other  playwrights 
is  what  appears  to  be  his  Inhuman  indifference 
to  all  those  sentiments  about  sex  and  dignity 
which  society  has  grown  to  look  upon  as  sacred. 
And  Shaw's  inhumanity  to  man,  in  the  romantic 
sense,  needs  no  apology — it  is  too  obvious  to 
be  explained  away,  and  too  obviously  deliberate 
to  be  treated  other  than  as  intended.  This  is  a 
point  that  has  raised  the  ire  of  the  tender- 
hearted, and  set  the  critics  by  the  ears.  The 
production  of  plays  from  a  new  recipe  is,  indeed, 
cause  enough  to  puzzle  those  who  had  thought 
nothing  so  final  as  the  Shakespearian  not-for-a- 
day-but-for-all-time  tradition.     But  this  cold- 

163 


Bernard  Shaw 

ness  and  apparent  lack  of  human  kindness  is 
relative.  Bernard  Shaw  is,  indeed,  frigid  in 
reference  to  many  of  the  things  that  arouse 
emotional  warmth  in  most  people,  but  this 
does  not  mean  that  he  lacks  feeling.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  he  feels  deeply  and  passionately, 
but  not  for  the  things  for  which  one  is  usually 
supposed  to  feel  deeply  and  passionately.  His 
plays  laugh  at  voluptuousness,  when  they 
are  not  denouncing  it,  whereas  the  average 
play  cloaks  it  in  a  veil  of  modesty,  always 
gratifying  to  the  playgoer  who  diligently 
permits  himself  to  feel  secretly  what  he 
would  not  dream  of  condoning  in  public. 
Hence,  when  a  dramatist  comes  and  pulls 
away  the  flimsy  veil  and  shows  life  from  the 
other  side,  he  naturally  seems  callous.  "  The 
reintroduction  of  problem,"  says  Shaw,  "with 
its  remorseless  logic  and  iron  framework  of 
fact  inevitably  produces  at  first  an  overwhelm- 
ing impression  of  coldness  and  inhuman  ration- 
alism. But  this  will  soon  pass  away.  When 
the  intellectual  muscle  and  moral  nerve  of  the 
critics  Bas  been  developed  in  the  struggle  with 

164 


The   Playwright 

modern  problem  plays,  the  pettish  luxurious- 
ness  of  the  clever  ones,  and  the  sulky  sense 
of  disadvantaged  weakness  in  the  sentimental 
ones,  will  clear  away  ;  and  it  will  be  seen  that 
only  in  the  problem  play  is  there  any  real 
drama."  To  the  modern  mind  this  must  be 
inevitable  if  we  are  to  have  a  vital  national 
drama.  Already  there  is  a  class  which  grows 
weary  of  the  eternal  recurrence  of  hackneyed 
sex  themes,  around  whose  pivot  dance  the 
dozen  or  so  plots  which  constitute  the  dramatic 
stock-in-trade  of  our  stage.  A  class  is  show- 
ing signs  of  existence  which  demands  a  drama 
that  shall  not  enervate  but  quicken  intelligence ; 
and  the  steadily  growing  audience  at  the 
Vcdrennc-Barker  performances  has  proved  that 
this  public  is  ready  to  support  what  it  demands. 
The  nature  of  the  conflict  which  drama 
represents  should  vary,  of  course,  with  every 
age.  For  the  conflict,  as  presented  on  the 
stage,  must  ultimately  resolve  itself  into  a 
struggle  between  man  and  the  manners  and 
conditions  of  the  period  in  which  he  exists. 
Finally  it  becomes  the  struggle  of  man  against 

L  165 


Bernard   Shaw 

the  obstacles  between  him  and  his  desires — 
between  man  and  what  he  wants.  These 
wants,  when  reduced  to  their  essence,  are 
nothing  short  of  life  itself.  Whether  it  be 
food  or  money  or  love,  it  is  all  the  same.  Our 
wants  are  but  points  at  which  we  become  con- 
scious of  life.  They  complete,  as  it  were, 
the  circle  of  the  conscious  and  sub-conscious, 
giving  the  flash  which  is  the  taste  of  eternity. 
No  conflict  between  man  and  his  environment 
can  occur  without  the  interposition  of  man's 
will.  It  is  the  clash  of  will  and  environment 
that  constitutes  drama,  whether  the  environ- 
ment be  some  impalpable  destiny  as  in  the 
Greek  Drama,  some  overwhelming  conception 
of  moral  obligation  as  in  the  Shakespearian,  or 
the  narrowing  ideals  and  institutions  of  an 
outworn  society  as  in  Ibsen  and  Tolstoy. 

The  place  of  Bernard  Shaw's  plays  is  in  the 
last  category.  Yet  they  are  distinct  both  from 
those  of  Tolstoy  and  Ibsen,  who  achieve,  it 
must  be  confessed,  an  impersonality  never  at- 
tained by  Shaw.  Ibsen  never  philosophises, 
Shaw  rarely  does  anything  else.     In  his  most 

i66 


The   Playwright 

impersonal  situations  the  cloven  hoof  of  the 
propagandist  is  evident.  You  look  at  A 
DolPs  House  in  that  nonplussed  way  in  which 
you  contemplate  life.  Candida  creates  quite 
a  different  impression  ;  in  this  play  you  are 
uncertain  as  to  whether  you  are  in  the  presence 
of  life  or  not ;  yet  in  spite  of  the  fact  that 
you  are  not  convinced  you  feel  vexed,  for  you 
are  tempted  to  believe  that  you  fail  to  do  so 
through  lack  of  intelligence.  Now  this  tempter 
is  a  fact — it  is  Shaw  tugging  your  intellect 
towards  his  point  of  view.  It  is  as  though 
the  possible  symbolism  of  the  door  through 
which  Nora  Helmer  in  A  DolTs  House  goes 
to  her  freedom  were  to  become  a  subtle 
undertone  of  moral  comment  throughout  the 
play.  It  is  symbolism  explaining  itself.  Ibsen 
shows  you  men  and  women  in  conflict  with 
personalities,  conduct,  and  tradition,  free  of  all 
comment  ;  he  rings  up  the  curtain  and  shows 
you  social  life  at  psychological  moments.  Shaw 
does  something  else.  He  sees  life  quite  as 
sharply  as  Ibsen  does,  he  states  what  he  sees 
with  the  same  acute  sense  of  fact,  but  he  can- 

167 


Bernard   Shaw 

not  or  will  not  entirely  separate  it  from  his 
own  explanatory  mind.  He  rings  up  the  cur- 
tain and  explains  social  life.  Where  Ibsen  is 
a  simple  realist  Shaw  is  an  expository  realist — 
he  is  Ibsen  become  self-conscious. 

But  it  is  not  finally  in  comparison  with 
Ibsen  that  the  true  Shaw  may  be  discovered. 
Rather  may  one  hope  to  do  so  in  comparison 
with  Shakespear — with  that  Shakespear  in  con- 
nection with  whom  there  has  been  so  much 
misunderstanding  of  Shaw.  For  after  all, 
different  as  are  Shaw  and  Ibsen,  there  is  that 
kinship  between  them  born  of  a  common 
Zeitgeist  which  does  not  belong  to  the  Eliza- 
bethan and  the  modern  dramatists.  We  must, 
in  the  first  place,  abandon  the  popular  belief 
that  Bernard  Shaw  is  attitudinising  when  he 
criticises  Shakespear.  He  is  endeavouring  as 
lucidly  as  a  clever  pen  and  an  almost  super- 
natural wit  will  allow  him  to  be  sincerely  and 
sanely  critical.  In  the  second  place,  we  must 
abandon  the  idea  that  Shaw  seeks  on  every 
occasion  to  disparage  Shakespear.  This  is 
simply  not  true,  and  there  are  many  passages 

i68 


The   Playwright 

in  his  Saturday  Review  criticisms  in  which  he 
appreciates  Shakespear  quite  as  eloquently  as 
those  who  consider  it  sacrilege  to  criticise  the 
bard  ;  as,  for  instance,  when  he  speaks  of 
Twelfth  Nig/it  and  J  Midsummer  Night's  Dream 
as  "  crown  jewels  of  dramatic  poetry,"  and  of 
J/I's  JVell  that  Ends  Well  being  rooted  in  his 
"deeper  affections."  Even  in  the  famous 
Better  than  Sha\espear  ?  preface  to  Three  Plays 
for  Puritans,  he  says  that  no  man  "  will  ever 
write  a  better  tragedy  than  Lear,"  and  again, 
in  a  letter  to  the  Daily  News,  17th  April, 
1905,  he  says:  *' In  manner  and  art  nobody 
can  write  better  than  Shakespear,  because, 
carelessness  apart,  he  did  the  thing  as  well  as 
it  can  be  done  within  the  limits  of  human 
faculty,"  which  all  goes  to  prove  at  least  that 
Shaw  is  not  an  indiscriminating  critic  ;  and 
further,  his  genuine  interest  in  Shakespear  is 
always  exemplified  in  the  severe  handling  he 
gives  those  popularisers  of  the  plays  who  cut 
and  prettify  them  out  of  all  recognition  to  suit 
public  taste.  His  antagonism  is  not  so  much 
towards  the  bard  as  towards  what   he   terms 

169 


Bernard   Shaw 

Bardolatry.  Judicious  readers  of  his  prefaces 
will  recognise  that  his  act  is  not  an  act  of  false 
criticism,  but  of  justifiable  iconoclasm. 

The  point  to  recognise  at  the  outset  is  th'at 
a  high  quality  of  execution  is  not  peculiar  to 
genius.  Perfect  execution  is  possible  to  any 
tyro  with  sufficient  staying  power  to  master 
the  constructive  details  of  a  craft.  Some- 
times, indeed,  fineness  of  execution  is  not 
even  the  result  of  a  talent  for  perseverance — 
it  is  a  trick.  In  every  age  there  are  practi- 
tioners as  clever  as  the  masters.  What  finally 
counts  is  the  depth  of  passion  which  informs 
the  work  of  one  who  knows  his  business,  be 
he  artist  or  merchant.  It  is  this  that  consti- 
tutes the  master.  It  is  the  working  of  what 
Shaw  calls  "  That  fruitful,  contained,  gov- 
erned, instinctively  utilised  passion  which 
makes  nations  and  individuals  great,"  and  not 
the  superficial  dexterity  of  the  dilettante. 

With  Shakespear's  dazzling  ability  Shaw 
has  no  further  quarrel  than  that  this  power  of 
rhetoric  has  been  the  cause  of  the  hero-wor- 
ship which  has  paralysed  frank  criticism.     For 

170 


The   Playwright 

in  spite  of  the  fact  that  playwrights  and 
managers  have  never  ceased  modifying,  adapt- 
ing, and  taking  other  liberties  with  the 
canonical  works,  the  transcendent  eloquence 
and  narrative  powers  of  these  same  works 
have  so  dominated  even  the  best  minds,  that 
not  only  these  qualities  but  the  very  morality 
and  attitude  towards  life  of  the  age  which  they 
so  superlatively  represent,  have  become  canon- 
ised and  invested  with  inviolability.  It  is  the 
fact  that  Shakespear  is  no  longer  a  sane  belief, 
but  a  superstition,  which  has  sent  Shaw  into 
the  public  place  with  words  of  wrath  and 
warning. 

Half  of  Shaw's  so-called  attack  upon  Shake- 
spear is  the  old  antagonism  of  the  free  mind 
with  the  academic  mind.  It  is  the  never- 
ending  struggle  of  faith,  will,  volition  with 
their  ancient  enemy,  tradition.  It  is  the  im- 
memorial war  between  the  bond  and  the  free, 
between  the  mind  that  accepts  and  the  mind 
that  creates.  In  Shaw  it  is  that  tenet  of 
his  faith  which  says  that  "  The  Golden  Rule  is 
that  there   are  no  golden  rules,"  expressing 

171 


Bernard   Shaw 

itself  in  terms  of  art  criticism.  For,  he  says, 
"  the  severity  of  artistic  discipline  is  produced 
by  the  fact  that  in  creative  art  no  ready-made 
rules  can  help  you,  there  is  nothing  to  guide 
you  to  the  right  expression  for  your  thought 
except  your  own  sense  of  beauty  and  fitness  ; 
and,  as  you  advance  upon  those  who  went 
before  you,  that  sense  of  beauty  and  fitness  is 
necessarily  often  in  conflict,  not  with  fixed 
rules,  because  there  are  no  rules,  but  with 
precedents." 

Progress  has  only  been  possible  by  the  con- 
stant challenging  of  current  conditions,  intel- 
lectual, spiritual,  or  temporal.  The  challenge 
of  what  is  accepted  and  fixed  is  the  only 
protection  life  knows  against  decay,  for  there  is 
no  permanence.  What  is  not  constantly  moving 
towards  the  more  desirable  must  be  receding 
towards  what  is  less  desirable.  Finality  in 
politics,  religion,  or  art  is  illusion.  "Where 
there  are  no  graves,  there  are  no  resurrections." 
Progress  is  always  accompanied  by  the  fall  of 
an  institution,  the  repudiation  of  a  church,  or 
the  negation  of  an  academy.     It  is  the  institu- 

172 


The   Playwright 

tion  of  a  final  authority  that  creates  revolution. 
This  is  nature's  reply  to  a  transgression  of  her 
laws.  Bernard  Shaw's  attitude  towards  Shake- 
spear  has  been  necessitated  by  the  existence  of 
a  Shakespearean  institution  ;  for  institutions 
only  spring  up  where  there  is,  as  Thoreau 
says,  "a  lull  of  truth."  Shaw  sees  that  so 
long  as  Shakespear  is  recognised  as  the  final 
authority  in  drama  there  can  be  no  more  possi- 
bility of  growth  in  that  art  than  there  could 
be  in  the  mind  of  man  under  the  jurisdiction 
of  an  authoritative  theocracy. 

But  this  is  only  one  side  of  his  heresy. 
The  other  is  the  undoing  of  the  meshes  into 
which  the  Shakespearean  tradition  has  cast  the 
native  drama.  The  criticism  he  makes  of 
Shakespear  might  easily  have  been  made  by 
Shakespear  upon  those  ideas  which  persisted  in 
hampering  the  free  expression  of  what  was 
modern  under  the  Renaissance.  For  all  live 
art  is  the  outcome  of  the  age  in  which  it  is 
born.  Idolatry  of  Shakespear  not  only  pre- 
vents a  true  appreciation  of  his  defects,  but  it 
increases  the  chances  of  their  being  mistaken 

173 


Bernard   Shaw 

for  his  good  qualities.  Worse  still,  it  gives  rise 
to  that  imitative  dabbling  which  in  the  end 
obscures  the  true  greatness  of  the  original. 
As  Shaw  has  pointed  out,  "  It  was  the  age  of 
gross  ignorance  of  Shakespear  and  incapacity 
for  his  works  that  produced  the  indiscriminate 
eulogies  with  which  we  are  familiar.  It  was 
the  revival  of  genuine  criticism  of  those  works 
that  coincided  with  the  movement  for  giving 
genuine  instead  of  spurious  and  silly  represen- 
tations of  his  plays." 

Masterpieces  are  only  "  final  for  their 
epoch,"  because  they  can  only  be  the  expres- 
sions of  a  philosophy  of  life  peculiar  to  their 
epoch.  That  is  why  Shaw  demands  a  drama 
free  of  Shakespearean  idolatry  ;  and  not  only 
a  drama,  but  art  in  all  its  branches,  illuminating 
the  age  with  the  light  of  its  own  ripe  ideas. 
For  it  is  obvious  that  what  was  true  for  the 
Elizabethans  is  no  longer  so  for  us.  The 
whole  world  is  changed.  The  epoch  begun 
then  has  reached  its  culminating  point,  and  is 
no  longer  in  the  ascendant.  Their  faiths  are 
our  superstitions,    and  they  would  long  ago 

174 


The   Playwright 

have  found  a  decent  repose  had  not  their 
ghosts  been  unnaturally  cajoled  to  walk  the 
night  across  that  last  refuge  of  defunct  ideas, 
the  British  stage.  The  serious  point  is,  the 
fact  that  since  our  average  man  must  take  his 
opinions  from  somewhere,  having  not  yet 
acquired  the  art  of  forming  his  own,  and  being 
no  longer  willing  to  accept  those  distributed 
from  the  pulpit,  he  has  no  recourse  but  to  the 
press  and  the  stage.  As  the  former  is  largely 
controlled  by  the  same  gentlemen  who  are  in- 
terested in  the  conservation  of  the  sixteenth- 
century  romanticism  of  the  latter,  it  has  come 
about  that  the  long-suffering  public  is  led  to 
believe  that  the  age  of  chivalry  is  still  with  us, 
though  its  actions  affirm  the  contrary  a  thou- 
sand times  a  day. 

Bernard  Shaw's  adverse  criticism  of  Shake- 
spear  is  the  most  obvious  side  of  his  antagon- 
ism to  romanticism  generally;  to  the  point 
of  view  that  is  consistent  in  its  vision  but 
inconsistent  in  its  deduction  ;  to  the  mind 
which  can  grasp  a  reality,  but  will  not  accept 
it  unless  it  is  dressed  romantically  ;  and  par- 

175 


Bernard   Shaw 

ticularly  to  that  extensive  field  of  romantic 
energy  which  finds  expression  in  the  affection 
of  the  sexes.  And  since  his  most  incisive 
words  on  the  subject  have  been  part  and  parcel 
of  his  dramatic  criticism,  it  was  to  be  expected 
of  him  that  when  he  became  a  dramatist  him- 
self his  plays  would,  at  any  rate,  tend  towards 
the  establishment  of  an  unromantic  drama  in 
this  country.  And  this  is  just  what  his  plays 
are.  They  stand  to  drama  in  much  the  same 
way  as  Whitman's  Leaves  of  Grass  stand  to 
poetry.  They  are  not  the  usual  conventional 
thing,  not  the  polished  article  beloved  of  the 
virtuosi  and  demanded  by  the  schools.  Shaw 
and  Whitman  possess  both  drama  and  poetry 
equal  in  the  recognised  way  to  the  best  work 
of  the  accepted  masters.  But  Shaw's  plays 
and  Whitman's  poems  are  alike  tentative  ;  they 
are  hints  and  even  something  more  than  hints ; 
they  are  suggestions  and  indications  of  the 
work  of  poet  and  playwright  to  come. 

As  the  sentimental  romance  which  dominates 
the  stage  has  been  the  chief  negation  of  Shaw's 
criticism  of  the  stage,  it  was  natural  that  out 

176 


The   Playwright 

of  this  should  spring  his  plays.  These  have 
demonstrated  that  interesting  stage  plays  can 
be  made  in  which  the  love  interest  is  a  phase 
among  other  important  and  interesting  phases 
of  the  drama  of  life.  And  in  one  play  par- 
ticularly, and  in  others  incidentally,  he  has 
shown  that  there  can  be  dramatic  force,  in- 
terest, and  truth  in  a  situation  in  which  the 
unromantic  conception  of  masculine  subjection 
to  feminine  passion  and  privilege  is  made  a 
central  theme. 

Although  this  stand  against  the  romance  of 
love  is  taken  up  in  each  of  his  plays,  it  finds 
a  special  voice  in  Casar  and  Cleopatra  which 
is  a  deliberate  challenge  to  the  Shakespearean 
tradition.  And  not  only  a  challenge,  he  can- 
didly offers  his  Caesar  as  an  improvement  on 
Shakespear's,  at  the  same  time  claiming  for 
himself  the  right  Shakespear  claimed  when 
he  interpreted  Caesar  and  Brutus  according  to 
his  own  light  and  not  that  of  Plutarch  ;  or 
later,  as  Mommsen  and  Carlyle  have  each 
realised  the  same  and  other  historical  facts  in 
the   light    of  their    own    philosophy   of  life, 

177 


Bernard   Shaw 

regardless  of  conflict  with  previous  conceptions. 
It  must  be  noted  that  Shaw  does  not  offer  his 
Caesar  and  his  Cleopatra  as  the  conceptions  of 
his  age  :  they  are  presented  simply  as  his 
own  conceptions.  He  deals  with  past  history 
in  just  the  same  spirit  as  with  present,  with 
neither  more  nor  less  reverence.  His  Cassar 
is  clever,  masterful,  unscrupulous,  a  philosopher 
and  a  man  of  action,  and  not  a  pompous  and 
heroic  simulacrum.  His  Cleopatra,  a  girl  in 
years,  a  child  in  wilfulness,  is  a  woman  in 
cunning.  Love  is  an  incident  in  the  life  of 
Caesar,  a  means  to  an  end  in  that  of  Cleopatra. 
And  each  figure  in  the  play  talks  and  acts 
with  the  spontaneous  inevitability  of  human 
beings  of  any  epoch.  But  in  addition  to  this 
and  as  a  substitute  for  the  prescribed  activity 
of  the  traditional  stage  heroes,  the  theatrical 
picture-photographs  which  have  been  handed 
down  to  us  by  each  succeeding  age  of  dramatists, 
we  have  a  new  precedent.  Bernard  Shaw  him- 
self steps  upon  the  stage.  He  enters  into  the 
minds  of  all  his  characters,  and  adds  his  own 
definitely  modern  note  to  the  careful  realism 

178 


The  Playwright 

of  the  theme.  It  is  ancient  history  born 
anew  after  the  trials  and  tribulations,  the  ex- 
periences and  thoughts  of  hundreds  of  inter- 
vening years.  Caesar  talks  like  Shaw,  and 
becomes  more  like  Caesar.  Cleopatra  prattles 
like  a  pampered  and  peevish  girl,  and  reveals 
the  eternal  feminine.  Ptolemy  is  a  boy  with 
the  years  of  his  forbears  weighing  him  down. 
It  is  in  reality  not  the  representation  of  h^istory. 
It  is  not  merely,  as  Shaw  would  have  us  accept 
it,  the  treatment  of  men  and  women  as  natural 
history.  It  is  a  new  light  thrown  upon  history. 
It  is  history  revived  by  the  aid  of  the  intensity 
of  recollected  experiences, — the  experiences 
that  have  come  between  the  ages,  that  are 
always  in  process  of  reforming  the  mind  and 
feelings  of  succeeding  years.  Bernard  Shaw 
has  focussed  the  light  of  the  ages  as  construed 
in  himself,  and  revealed  us  a  new  world  in  the 
old  and  an  old  world  in  the  new. 

With  the  repudiation  of  romantic  love 
must  be  coupled  Shaw's  other  great  heresy — 
the  renunciation  of  the  idea  of  duty.  It  is 
these   two   negations    which   form    the    staple 

179 


Bernard   Shaw 

critical  ingredients  of  the  plays.  Their  exist- 
ence lies  behind  his  creative  faculty.  They 
are  the  parents  of  all  those  children  of  his 
imagination,  those  distinctly  Shavian  types, 
whose  existence  in  his  plays  are  among  the 
most  distinct  facts  of  recent  art.  Shaw  has 
embodied  his  ideas  of  unromantic  dutiless 
man  in  human  forms,  and  his  drama  is  the 
conflict  of  these  individuals  with  the  non- 
Shavian  type — that  is,  with  the  average  type 
of  man.  This  is  the  fundamental  action  of 
his  plays. 

The  great  danger  of  such  a  method  is  the 
possible  over-emphasis  of  the  characteristics 
of  their  author  so  as  to  draw  the  interest  of 
the  spectators  from  the  drama  to  him.  This, 
it  must  be  admitted,  has  happened  in  Shaw's 
case,  and  there  is  imminent  danger  of  his 
ideas  being  altogether  lost  in  the  enthusiasm 
for  the  Shavian  expression  of  the  thing  rather 
than  for  the  thing  itself.  And  though  all  his 
characters  are  oratorically  Shaws,  he  has  gone 
out  of  his  way  on  at  least  two  occasions,  in 
the  stage  representations  of  Man  and  Superman, 

1 80 


The   Playwright 

and  in  The  Admirable  Bashville^  to  allow  a  photo- 
graphic resemblance  of  himself  to  help  the  easy 
illusion. 

Yet  when  Shaw  is  not  embodying  his 
philosophy  of  life  in  a  character  but  merely 
using  his  wonderful  gift  of  observation,  he 
can  delineate  men  and  women  with  all  the 
definiteness  of  great  art.  One  of  his  charac- 
ters at  least — the  famous  old  waiter  in  You 
Never  Can  Tell — may  be  claimed  to  rank 
with  the  supreme  humorous  conceptions  of 
literature.  But  such  work  is  not  Shaw's  aim. 
The  dominance  of  his  intellect  and  his  ten- 
dency towards  wit  rather  than  humour  would 
make  it  difficult  for  him  to  create  those  en- 
during humorous  types  which  help  to  make 
the  art  of  fiction  tolerable  —  FalstafF  and 
Corporal  Trim,  Gargantua,  Tartarin,  Pick- 
wick, Richmond-Roy.  These  are,  in  fact,  the 
masterpieces  of  that  romantic  era  which  the 
plays  of  Bernard  Shaw  renounce — but  never 
denounce.  Shaw  is  the  critic  of  his  period, 
and  not  its  caricaturist.  His  renunciation 
is    too   complete    for    that.     To    be    a   good 

M  i8i 


Bernard  Shaw 

caricaturist  one  must  be  in  love  with  the  thing 
burlesqued.  One  must  not  seek  to  abolish 
the  thing  itself,  but  only  its  follies.  This  is 
the  real  difference  between  the  satirist  and  the 
caricaturist,  between  the  revolutionary  critic 
and  the  conservative  critic,  between  Bernard 
Shaw  and,  say,  W.  S.  Gilbert,  a  dramatist  who 
has  shown  as  much  originality  from  one  point 
of  view  as  Shaw  has  from  another.  For  Gilbert 
mustbe  recognised  as  a  distinctive  feature  in  our 
modern  drama,  as  one  of  the  very  rare  features, 
along  with  the  J.  M.  Barrie  of  The  Admirable 
Crichtorty  the  W.  B.  Yeats  of  fVhere  There  is 
Nothings  and  with  Oscar  Wilde  ;  not  to  do 
more  than  mention  the  younger  generation  of 
modern  playwrights  as  exemplified  in  the 
splendid  work  of  men  like  Granville  Barker, 
John  Galsworthy,  and  John  Masefield,  which 
is,  properly  speaking,  the  first  fruit  of  the 
new  era. 

If  we  take  then,  for  instance,  the  Gilbertian 
and  the  Shavian  treatment  of  the  conception 
of  duty,  we  shall  arrive  at  something  like  the 
truth  of  the  matter.     Duty  to  the  conserva- 

182 


The   Playwright 

tive  Gilbert  is  a  desirable  thing,  in  moderation  ; 
it  is  the  fanaticism  of  duty  which  he  abhors. 
To  exhibit  the  folly  of  this  he  creates  a  series 
of  ingenious  incidents  in  which  duty  is  pushed 
to  an  absurdity — as  in  the  diverting  burlesque, 
The  Pirates  of  Penzance.  Now  the  revolutionary 
Shaw,  who  has  no  illusions  about  the  value  of 
duty,  seeks  to  abolish  it  altogether.  He  there- 
fore does  not  attempt  to  make  duty  look 
ridiculous  by  exaggeration  ;  this  from  his 
point  of  view  is  supererogatory.  He  simply 
creates  a  figure  who  is  free  of  all  subservience 
to  the  convention  and  sets  him  in  action  among 
the  dutiful — as  in  the  incidents  throughout  his 
plays,  but  in  a  more  concrete  form  in  Major 
Barbara. 

The  main  difference  between  the  Shavian  and 
the  Gilbertian  play  is  that,  in  the  former,  life  in 
its  ordinary  channels  is  looked  upon  in  much 
the  same  way  as  in  the  latter  in  its  extra- 
ordinary channels.  Shaw  fears  the  dangers  of 
the  normal — Gilbert  of  the  abnormal.  This  is 
why  Gilbert  always  writes  burlesque-comedy 
and  Shaw  tragi-comedy.     One  laughs  happily 

183 


Bernard   Shaw 

with  the  author  of  PatiencCy  but  with  the 
author  of  Major  Barbara  one  laughs  sadly. 
The  laughter  of  the  one  is  produced  by  a 
desirable  excess  of  the  comforts  of  civilisa- 
tion. It  is  the  dwellers  in  a  right  little,  tight 
little  island  making  merry  over  the  tolerable 
defects  of  an  on-the-whole  lovable  little  sys- 
tem. It  is  the  self-satisfied  side  glance  of 
highly  civilised  people.  It  is,  in  fact,  Mere- 
dith's *'  oblique  ray  "  in  action  ;  the  result  is 
comedy,  and  it  awakens,  as  the  great  novelist 
expected  of  comedy,  "  thoughtful  laughter," 
with  the  thought  part  of  it,  judging  by  results, 
not  very  deep. 

Now  Shaw  also  throws  the  oblique  ray  upon 
institutions,  but  he  is  not  like  Gilbert,  on  the 
whole,  a  supporter  of  these  institutions.  On 
the  whole,  he  is  their  arch-enemy.  His 
comedy  provokes  the  laughter  of  the  mind 
also.  It  is  designed  for  this  purpose,  but  not 
for  this  purpose  alone.  It  does  not  aim  at 
laughter  as  an  end  in  itself.  It  does  not  aim 
at  producing  a  state  of  hilarity  which  is  hap- 
pily intolerant  and   contentedly  impotent.     It 


The   Playwright 

would  make  you  laugh  by  stinging  you  into 
something  better  ;  it  would  make  thoughtful 
laughter  the  prelude  to  thoughtful  act.  That 
action  does  not  always  follow  is  the  tragic  side 
of  his  comedy  and  the  tragedy  of  his  propa- 
ganda. 

The  plays  of  Bernard  Shaw  are  tragi- 
comedies conceived  in  the  form  of  dialogue 
with  dramatic  interludes.  Most  of  them 
would  answer  to  his  description  of  Major  Bar- 
bara^ which  he  frankly  called  a  "  discussion." 
The  tendency  latterly  has  been  towards  this 
element.  Discussion  has  become  the  pre- 
dominant partner  in  the  dramatic  arrangement 
— indeed,  the  action  has  become  discussion. 
As  Shaw  has  grown  towards  mysticism  his 
plays  have  become  more  static.  His  characters 
talk  dynamics,  but  they  do  next  to  nothing. 
The  point  to  realise  here  is  that  his  discussions 
still  retain  that  interest  without  which  the' 
drama  would  fail  in  its  object — they  are  still 
dramatic.  But  the  action  is  no  longer  the 
conflict  between  men  and  things,  nor  yet 
between   man    and    man.     It    is  a  conflict  of 

185 


Bernard  Shaw- 
ideas  as  expressed  in  varying  temperaments 
and  by  differing  wills.  His  characters  do  not 
kill  each  other,  neither  do  they  kill  them- 
selves ;  material  force  has  become  akin  to 
annotation  rather  than  theme.  They  talk  to 
each  other — they  discuss. 

Shaw  has  introduced  philosophic  dialogue 
into  the  activity  of  the  stage,  and  the  audience 
has  stayed  to  listen.  And  it  would  not  be  an 
extravagant  thing  to  say  that  he  would  allow 
material  action  to  drop  out  altogether  without 
the  least  reluctance  could  he  keep  his  audi- 
torium full  without  it.^  This  does  not  mean 
the  annihilation  of  drama.  He  has  done 
dramatically  in  another  way  what  Maeterlinck 
did  for  the  spirit  of  man.  He  has  created  a 
static  drama  of  the  intelligence,  which  can  be 
quite  as  dramatic  as  the  most  intense  incidents 
in  the  dramatic  idea  which  gave  us  Aglavaine  et 
Selysette  and  Le  mort  de  Tintagiles. 

^  A  fact  accomplished  in  the  recent  production  of  the 
philosophic  interlude  from  Man  and  Superman,  under  the 
title,  Don  Juan  in  Uell^  at  the  Royal  Court  Theatre. 
Here  the  static  conditions  are  maintained  throughout ;  so 
much  so  that  hardly  a  critic  in  London  could  contain  his 
indignation — nevertheless,  the  theatre  was  filled  with  an 
attentive  and  appreciative  audience  for  many  matinees. 

i86 


The  Playwright 

The  dramatic  moments  in  his  plays  thrill 
with  a  difference.  It  is  not  the  thrill  of  pent- 
up  emotion.  It  is  the  altogether  new  thrill 
experienced  by  those  who  come  in  contact 
with  a  reality  which  is  familiar  but  strange.  It 
is  unlike  the  alleged  realities  of  romantic 
drama,  with  its  purple  patches  of  battle,  mur- 
der, and  sudden  death.  It  is  the  sudden 
realisation  of  all  those  feelings  and  thoughts 
which  have  never  been  brought  under  vivid 
observation.  The  great  surprises  of  Shaw's 
drama  are  the  sincere  actions  of  more  or  less 
ordinary  people. 

This  action,  which  began  as  sociological 
drama,  has  become  philosophical  drama.  His 
men  and  women  are  no  longer  mere  types  of 
a  nation  of  shopkeepers.  They  are  symbols  of 
the  world-will.  The  conflict  in  his  plays  is 
now  like  the  focussed  point  at  which  the  con- 
tact of  inflammable  objects  with  the  sun-rays 
through  a  convex  glass  produces  fire — only  for 
sun-rays  we  have  will-power.  The  quintes- 
sence of  Shaw's  plays  is  the  concentration  of 
will  into  the  energy  of  life. 

187 


Bernard   Shaw 

There  is  no  doubt  that  in  his  early  plays  he 
had  only  a  vague  idea  of  the  theme  which  he 
has  eventually  made  his  own.  In  Mrs. 
Warrens  Profession  there  was  a  momentary 
anticipation  of  the  seemingly  perverse  views 
of  the  later  stage.  But  as  his  view  of  life 
has  developed  his  drama  has  changed  accord- 
ingly. What  in  Widowers'  Houses  and  Mrs. 
Warren's  Profession  is  an  expression  of  the 
reformer's  zeal  plus  an  exceedingly  acute 
power  of  observation  ;  what  in  Arms  and  the 
Man,  Tou  Never  Can  Tell,  and  Captain  Brass- 
bound's  Conversion  is  a  keen  sense  of  satiric 
comedy  plus  the  moral  revolutionist's  con- 
tempt for  conventional  manners  ;  becomes  in 
Man  and  Superman,  Major  Barbara,  and  The 
Doctors  Dilemma  the  expression  of  a  view  of 
life  which  has  by  no  means  lost  either  its 
reformer's  zeal,  its  revolutionist's  scorn,  or 
its  power  of  observation,  but  has  added  to 
these  an  insight  penetrating  deep  below  sur- 
faces and  a  philosophy  embracing  the  whole 
of  human  life. 

The    early   anticipations    appeared    in    the 

i88 


The   Playwright 

whimsical  activity,  the  almost  elfish  wilfulness 
of  such  characters  as  Frank  in  Mrs,  IVarrens 
Profession ;  the  Twins  and  Valentine  in  Tou 
Never  Can  Tell;  Marchbanks  in  Candida, 
coupled  with  the  strange  power  of  such 
women  as  Candida,  in  the  same  play,  and  Lady 
Cecily  Waynflete  in  Captain  Brassbound's  Con- 
version. The  unexpected  always  happened 
with  these  people  ;  they  did  things  that  were 
different  from  the  usual,  so  different  as  to  be 
ranked  as  unnatural.  Now,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  these  figures  are  not  unnatural  at  all. 
They  are  simply  people  acting  from  quite 
natural  as  distinct  from  conventional  motives. 
They  are  people  doing  what  they  like  to  do 
and  what  they  can  do  for  their  own  reasons, 
which  is  no  reason,  and  not  as  in  the  ordinary 
romantic  way  in  deference  to  some  precon- 
ceived ideal. 

These  characters  were  the  forerunners  of 
the  genuine  Shaw  conception  of  Man,  who  is 
really  undeveloped  Superman.  His  first  ap- 
pearance was  in  The  DeviFs  Disciple y  in  the 
part  of  Dick  Dudgeon,  who  steps  on  to  the 

189 


Bernard   Shaw 

stage  surrounded  by  all  the  appurtenances  of 
histrionic  romance,  and  does  just  what  he 
wants  to  do,  following  the  opposite  to  the 
conventional  God,  the  Devil,  and  succeeding 
in  being  the  only  really  lovable  character  in 
the  play.  In  life,  Shaw  would  have  us  ob- 
serve, the  lovable  beings  are  the  self-centred, 
those  who  act  from  their  own  initiative  in 
their  own  way.  Their  power  is  infectious 
just  as  weakness  is,  but  to  infect  with  power  is 
to  bring  joy,  even  though  the  world  rocks 
with  the  effort. 

Dick  Dudgeon  is  the  real  Shaw  hero — the 
man  who  knows  what  he  wants  and  wills  his 
way  to  it.  He  reappears  in  another  form  as 
Andrew  Undershaft  in  Major  Barbara,  the 
incarnation  of  self-expression  rather  than  self- 
suppression,  the  sign  of  the  Sword  as  distinct 
from  the  sign  of  the  Cross.  It  is  not  neces- 
sary, however,  that  the  activity  of  these  em- 
bryonic supermen  should  be  towards  the  social 
ends  desired  by  Shaw.  The  final  aim  is  that 
they  should  be  strong,  self-balanced,  free, 
capable  of  willing  and  acting — the   rest  will 

190 


The   Playwright 

follow.  Even  the  misf^aced  activity  of  tbe 
conquering  Anglo-Saxon  Broadbent  in  JtXm 
Bu/fs  Other  Island  is  bcttCT  than  the  in- 
effectual bickerings  of  the  peasantry  for  crcr 
building  ideals  which  they  never  realise  are 
prisons. 

But  the  spirit  which  dominates  the  figures  in 
Shaw's  plays  is  growing  further  removed  from 
that  which  is  the  impelling  motive  in  other 
plays,  or,  rather,  it  is  becoming  more  and  more 
conscious  of  its  own  importance.  His  hero  is 
no  longer  a  man  ;  it  is  the  Life  Force  finding 
expression,  as  it  did  in  Ibsen,  in  the  "  recogni- 
tion of  an  eternally  womanly  prind|4c  in  the 
universe."  Women  appear  in  his  |4ajs  in  aa 
entirely  new  lighL  They  no  longer  snbaiit 
prettily  to  man's  fabled  dominance,  but  maa 
finally  succumbs  to  theirs.  The  cosy  pas- 
sivity of  domestic  romance  is  replaced  by  aa 
activity  informed  with  a  new  and  critical  cun- 
ning :  the  power  of  a  great  dement  being 
consciously  used  for  the  first  time.  LofvaMc- 
ness  and  womanliness  are  no  longer  romantic 
charms  to  be  eagerly  sought  and  cherished  by 

191 


Bernard   Shaw 

infatuated  males;  they  charm  certainly,  but  by 
the  same  means  that  predatory  animals  attract 
their  quarry.  They  are  the  protective  colour- 
ing of  nature's  creative  needs,  civilised  and 
moralised,  so  that  he  who  comes  within  their 
power  can  no  longer  call  himself  his  own.  He 
is  henceforth  their  disillusioned  slave  and 
their  owner's  property. 

Shaw  expresses  the  contrary  idea  to  that  in- 
terpreted by  Meredith  in  The  Egoist.  Clara 
Middleton  flies  from  the  overbearing  egoism 
of  Sir  Willoughby  Patterne,  but  it  is  woman 
who  is  the  conqueror  in  Man  and  Superman 
and  man  the  defeated.  For  John  Tanner, 
after  struggling  as  passionately  for  his  liberty 
as  romantic  lovers  struggle  for  the  thraldom 
of  love,  at  length  capitulates  to  the  Life  Force 
in  the  person  of  Ann  Whitefield  under  pro- 
test, in  the  grip  of  a  power  beyond  his  control. 
This  power  is  Nature  consolidating  her  perma- 
nence by  the  instrumentality  of  sex  in  its 
most  patient,  cunning,  and  captivating  form — 
woman.  Ann,  whom  we  are  informed  is  every- 
woman  though  every  woman  is  not  Ann,  is  the 

192 


The   Playwright 

direct  ally  of  the  Life  Force  unscrupulously 
determined  in  its  set  purpose  and  wildly 
jealous  of  all  competing  purposes,  and  Tanner 
is  a  precocious  dawning  of  the  world-will 
striving  to  maintain  the  concentrative  force  of 
its  energy  in  his  personality  for  objects  other 
than  home  and  babies. 

Man  and  Superman  is  a  modern  version  of 
the  fall  of  man.  It  is  man  resisting  the 
tempter  and  failing.  He  eats  again  of  the 
tree  of  the  knowledge  of  good  and  evil,  but 
this  time  he  is  aware  of  his  act  and  his  weak- 
ness. He  knows  that  by  eating  the  fruit  his 
power  is  crippled,  he  henceforth  must  act 
within  the  circle  of  good  and  evil,  and  not 
beyond  it  in  the  Nietzschean  sense.  There- 
fore, John  Tanner  struggles — struggles  desper- 
ately for  freedom,  honour,  self,  one  and 
indivisible — all  to  no  avail.  He  is  captured 
by  the  Life  Force  in  the  guise  of  a  woman. 

That  is  the  new  being  Shaw  has  made,  or 
rather  the  natural  fact  he  has  discovered  and 
interpreted.  He  has  symbolised  instinct 
directed  by  will  at  the  dawn  of  the  conscious- 

193 


Bernard  Shaw 

ness  of  its  own  innate  power.  He  has  flashed 
this  idea  upon  the  stage  in  a  series  of  brilliant 
scenes,  incidents,  and  personalities  with  a  con- 
tempt for  artistic  tradition  only  possible  in  the 
master. 


194 


BERNARD    SHAW 

1904 


IV 
THE    PHILOSOPHER 


Ana.  Is  there  nothing  in  Heaven  but  contemplation, 
Juan  ? 

Den  Juan.  In  the  Heaven  I  seek,  no  other  joy.  But 
there  is  the  work  of  helping  life  in  its  struggle  upward. 
Think  of  how  it  wastes  and  scatters  itself,  how  it  raises  up 
obstacles  to  itself  and  destroys  itself  in  its  ignorance  and 
blindness.  It  needs  a  brain,  this  irresistible  force,  lest  in  its 
ignorance  it  should  resist  itself.  What  a  piece  of  work  is 
man  !  says  the  poet.  Yes  :  but  what  a  blunderer  !  Here  is 
the  highest  miracle  of  organisation  yet  attained  by  life,  the 
most  intensely  alive  thing  that  exists,  the  most  conscious  of 
all  the  organisms ;  and  yet,  how  wretched  are  his  brains ! 
Stupidity  made  sordid  and  cruel  by  the  realities  learnt  from 
toil  and  poverty  :  Imagination  resolved  to  starve  sooner  than 
face  these  realities,  piling  up  illusions  to  hide  them,  and  calling 
itself  cleverness,  genius !  And  each  accusing  the  other  of 
its  own  defect  :  Stupidity  accusing  Imagination  of  folly,  and 
Imagination  accusing  Stupidity  of  ignorance  :  whereas,  alas ! 
Stupidity  has  all  the  knowledge,  and  Imagination  all  the 
intelligence. — Man  and  Superman^  Act  iii,  pp.  105-6. 


IV 

THE    PHILOSOPHER 

'IXT'HILST  not  despising  his  own  power  as  an 
artist,  Bernard  Shaw  rightly  looks  upon 
himself  as  a  philosopher.  That  is  to  say,  he 
has  a  clear  and  ordered  conception  of  life  and 
the  relationship  of  its  various  parts.  Such  a 
type  of  mind  has  never  been  properly  valued 
in  Britain  except  in  a  very  superficial  way  : 
we  value  the  moralist  more  than  the  philoso- 
pher. This  may  be  a  national  form  of  self- 
appreciation,  a  kind  of  racial  egotism  ;  we  are 
all  moralists  more  or  less.  No  philosopher 
could  be  popular  under  such  circumstances, 
for  by  the  very  nature  of  his  calling  he  would 
tend  to  disturb  the  habitual  peace  of  mind 
incidental  to  moral  certitude.  And  few  human 
beings  like  having  their  habits  disturbed. 
True  philosophy  is  never  far  removed  from 

N  197 


Bernard   Shaw 

criticism.  It  is  really  the  critical  habit  of 
mind  expressing  itself  in  terms  of  life.  It  is 
a  constant  arranging  and  rearranging  of  the 
details  of  life,  and  is  as  bewildering  and  varied 
as  these  are.  Or,  rather,  it  is  as  varied  as  the 
perceptive  faculty  is  quick  to  receive  and  apply 
impressions  of  life.  A  great  store  is  set 
upon  originality  in  such  matters.  But  origi- 
nality matters  very  little  and  very  fortunately, 
because  there  is  very  little  of  it,  especially  in 
the  world  of  ideas.  What  does  matter  is  the 
force  of  its  application — the  vividness  of  its 
portrayal.  Individuality  of  expression,  not 
novelty,  is  originality. 

It  is  the  business  of  the  philosopher  to  be 
engaged,  not  so  much  with  his  own  ideas,  as 
with  finding  expression  for  those  ideas  neces- 
sary to  his  age,  which  have  not  yet  been 
adequately  expressed  in  the  terms  of  his  era. 
The  philosopher  is  the  interpreter  of  an  age. 
He  tells  you  what  you  mean.  He  translates 
the  dreams,  thoughts,  and  aspirations  of  an 
age  into  the  currency  of  common  thought. 
And  by  doing  this  he  indicates  fresh  lines  of 

198 


The   Philosopher 

action.  Were  it  not  for  him  the  wheel  of  pro- 
gress would  remain  stationary.  Bernard  Shaw, 
the  philosopher,  sees  the  wheel  of  the  modern 
social  wagon  stuck  in  a  deep  rut  and  the 
driver  and  passengers  quite  indifferent.  Having 
a  keen  sense  of  natural  laws,  he  knows  very- 
well  that  if  they  don't  wake  up  and  move 
along,  the  wheels  will  become  rotten  and  the 
whole  thing  fall  to  pieces.  So  with  much  con- 
cern, being  a  kind-hearted  man,  he  starts,  with 
generous  intent,  to  criticise — that  is,  in  Eng- 
lish, to  insult  the  passengers.  And  after 
much  endeavour  he  has  made  so  much  of  an 
impression  that  some  of  them  have  actually 
got  out  of  the  wagon  and  put  their  shoulders 
to  the  wheel.  That  is  what  Shaw  wants.  He 
does  not  say,  "  Hitch  your  wagon  to  a  star," 
but  "  Put  your  shoulder  to  the  wheel." 

Bernard  Shaw's  originality,  among  modern 
philosophers  at  least,  lies  in  the  closeness  with 
which  his  ideas  are  related  to  society  itself. 
I  mean  not  the  sameness,  but  the  organic 
relationship  which  exists  between  his  ideas  and 
the  actions  of  ordinary  men  and  women.     His 

199 


Bernard  Shaw 

concepts  are  like  a  running  commentary  upon 
the  doings  of  his  fellows.  This  is  brought 
out  very  clearly  in  the  apt  use  he  makes  of 
personal  experience  and  personal  observation, 
both  in  his  essays  and  in  his  lectures  and  con- 
versation. The  last,  indeed,  is  largely  composed 
of  humorously  annotated  reminiscences. 

This  difference  is  one  of  the  chief  causes  of 
his  many  incisions  into  popular  conventions 
and  the  consequent  intellectual  bloodshed.  So 
long  as  a  philosopher  remains  abstracted  from 
intimate  relations  with  the  doings  of  his  kind  ; 
so  long  as  he  theorises  broadly  and  learnedly  ; 
so  long  will  he  be  quite  safe  from  doing  harm 
or  good.  But  once  let  him  apply  his  ideas  to 
daily  affairs  and  trouble,  not  necessarily  ad- 
vantageous, may  be  expected.  For  it  is 
possible  that  a  philosopher  who  is  alive  to 
modern  needs  may  set  society  on  the  wrong 
track,  but  it  is  quite  certain  he  will  set  it  by 
the  ears.  The  point  is,  however,  that  philo- 
sophy, like  art,  is  vital  only  when  it  is  applied 
to  life.  That  is  Bernard  Shaw's  position  ;  he 
is  vital  to  the  age,  to  the  hour,  because  his 

200 


The   Philosopher 

ideas  are  constantly  coming  in  touch  with  the 
everyday  affairs. 

This  is  brought  out  in  his  plays  and  elabor- 
ated in  his  prefaces.  He  seems  always  to  be 
dealing  with  the  immediate  destiny  of  men 
and  women  with  a  desire  to  frustrate  the 
workings,  not  only  of  a  wasteful  social  system, 
but  of  destiny  itself,  or  rather,  to  put  human 
beings  in  such  a  position  as  to  leave  the  final 
word  with  them,  and  not  with  the  unknown. 
Unlike  Ibsen's  plays,  which  depict  and  symbo- 
lise the  net  of  convention  and  destiny  in  which 
all  men  are  caught,  interpreting  a  dramatic 
idea  which  realises  the  dawning  of  a  conscious 
struggle  with  this  appalling  tyranny,  Bernard 
Shaw's  plays  give  us  a  picture  of  men  and 
women  just  a  little  more  advanced  in  the  scale 
of  consciousness.  His  characters  have  tasted 
with  more  appreciation  the  fruit  of  the  tree 
of  knowledge  of  good  and  evil.  They  not_ 
only  taste,  but  are  inclined  to  enjoy.  Shaw^ 
philosophy  is  the  expression  of  this  attitudjs 
towards  life.  It  is  an  attitude  which,  if  not 
exactly  beyond  good  and  evil,  is  at  least  beyond 

20 1 


Bernard   Shaw 

any  good  and  evil  other  than  that  which  is 
generated  in  the  individual.  Bernard  Shaw  is 
a  philosophic  missioner.  He  has  the  preach- 
ing habit  in  an  extreme  degree.  Indeed,  with 
another  turn  of  the  wheel,  it  is  quite  think- 
able, he  might  have  been  saving  souls  instead 
of  brains — and  possibly  he  is  already  doing  so. 

The  central  idea  in  his  philosophy  is  the 
conception  of  the  underlying  energy  of  life  as 
the  world-will.  He  has  conceived  this  as  a 
force — the  Life-force,  as  he  calls  it — eternally 
seeking  expression  by  instruments  of  greater 
certainty  and  power.  His  closeness  to  reality 
and  his  insistence  upon  the  concrete  has  made 
this  view  of  things  free  from  what  is  obscure 
and  shadowy.  At  the  same  time,  his  clear 
conception  of  the  Life-force  as  the  creative  will 
of  the  universe  is  profoundly  mystical.  Shaw 
as  a  thinker  must  indeed  be  classed  with  the 
more  practical  of  the  mystics.  He  has  a  similar 
outlook,  and  a  like  insistence  upon  immediate 
action,  a  lively  hatred  of  doing  nothing  and  of 
arguing  about  nothing. 

The    Life-force    must    not   be  imagined  as 

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The   Philosopher 

standing  apart  from  ordinary  things.  It  is 
neither  an  outside  and  independent  deity  nor 
a  metaphysical  toy.  On  the  contrary,  the  Life- 
force  has  for  Shaw  no  other  existence  than 
that  of  living  things.  Just  as  there  is  no  such 
thing  as  poverty,  but  only  poor  people  ;  just 
as  there  is  no  such  thing  as  happiness,  but  only 
happy  beings  ;  or  no  such  thing  as  beauty,  but 
only  beautiful  things  ;  so  for  Shaw  there  is  no 
such  final  and  complete  thing  as  the  world- 
will,  but  only  a  world  willing  itself  towards 
ampler  certainty  of  its  end.  By  this  attitude 
he  escapes  the  pitfalls  of  the  god-idea  which 
have  crippled  the  world  since  the  dawn  of 
history. 

The  Life-force  is  of  no  use  even  to  itself — 
granting  it  has  a  separate  existence — without 
organisms  ;  for  it  is  by  the  energy  of  these 
specialised  parts  towards  newer  specialisations 
that  it  has  its  being.  Bernard  Shaw  conceives 
the  pageant  of  life  as  an  evolution  whose  final 
consummation  is  not  man,  but  whose  progress 
is  towards  a  fuller  and  a  deeper  realisation 
of  its  own  purpose  and  aim.     The  universe 

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Bernard  Shaw 

for  him  is  nothing  less  than  a  series  of  magni- 
ficent experiments  made  by  the  Life-force 
with  the  object  of  creating  for  itself  an  all- 
powerful,  all-intelligent  medium  for  its  own 
expression. 

Man  is  no  more  final  in  this  series  of  ex- 
periments than  the  starfish  or  the  ape  were 
final.  If  that  had  been  the  aim  of  life,  surely 
the  result  were  not  worth  the  trouble ;  for,  after 
all,  there  is  very  little  real  difference  between 
man  and  what  man  is  pleased  to  call  the  lower 
animals.  The  differences  in  many  ways  are 
disadvantageous  to  man.  For  instance,  that 
very  little  difference  in  the  brain  of  man  which 
has  made  all  the  difference  in  the  world  be- 
tween him  and  the  animals,  whilst  giving  man 
a  keener  consciousness  of  joy,  has  also  given 
him  a  deeper  capacity  of  sorrow.  The  differ- 
ence is  between  a  frank  and  unthinking  accept- 
ance of  life  and  a  contemplative,  a  reflective, 
a  self-conscious  acceptance  of  life. 

Of  the  two,  the  simple  acceptance  of  life 
peculiar  to  the  animals  is  more  amenable  to 
the  Life-force   than  its   self-conscious  fellow. 

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The   Philosopher 

What  does  not  consciously  resist  is  naturally 
more  plastic.  And  so  long  as  the  highest 
forms  of  life  were  content  to  shut  their  eyes 
and  open  their  mouths,  and  be  thankful  for 
the  small  mercies  of  the  universe,  a  certain 
progress  was  made.  Shaw  does  not  look  upon 
this  progress,  or  evolution,  as  consecutive  and 
assured.  He  thinks  it  highly  probable  that 
the  Life-force  has  made  many  a  faulty  experi- 
ment. If,  as  he  truly  points  out,  man  is  a 
blunderer,  what  must  we  call  the  Life-force  for 
creating  man  ? 

The  whole  of  life  is  wrapped  up  in  this  as 
yet  inscrutable  question.  It  is  probable,  as 
Shaw  points  out,  there  is  a  shaping  force  im- 
manent in  life,  and  both  informing  and 
needing  concrete  things  ;  a  force  that  can 
only  have  its  will  when  these  beings  are  able 
to  take  their  will.  But  until  then  it  is  a  blind 
force,  powerful  enough  to  mould  the  stuff  of 
life  into  working  shapes,  tendril,  tentacle,  claw, 
hand,  or  what  not,  but  all  issuing  in  a  series 
of  cosmic  experiments,  on  an  infinite  scale  of 
seemingly  prodigal  wastefulness,  with  no  defi- 

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Bernard  Shaw 

nite  idea  as  to  results.  Time,  matter,  energy- 
spent  and  re-spent,  formed  and  re-formed, 
^ons  of  time  in  which  Life's  highest  expres- 
sion was  realised  in  an  eye  at  the  end  of  an 
antenna,  j^ons  of  time  in  which  the  eye  be- 
came the  window  of  a  brain  that  could  not 
reason.  And  still  further,  aeons  in  which  the 
eye  was  still  the  look-out  of  a  brain,  but  of  a 
brain,  as  in  man,  with  the  divine  gift  of  reason 
— a  gift  which  has  never  from  the  day  of  its 
creation  to  the  present  been  able  to  explain 
one  of  the  mysteries  that  were  inscrutable  at 
its  inception. 

Shaw  still  has  faith  in  this  mysteriously 
blundering  world-will  much  in  the  same  way 
as  people  used  to  have  faith  in  a  god.  But 
there  is  this  important  difference,  the  recogni- 
tion that  whatever  may  be  the  aim  of  the  Life- 
force,  it  can  never  attain  it,  not  only  without 
man,  but  without  the  series  of  experiments 
that  have  led  up  to  man.  In  fact,  Life  is  so 
needful  of  man  that  the  only  worthy  thing  for 
man  to  do  is  to  help  Life  in  its  struggle  up- 
ward ;  to  prevent  a  repetition  or  continuance 

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The   Philosopher 

of  all  this  waste  of  energy  and  material  that 
has  proceeded  through  the  ages  of  ignorance 
and  blindness  :  the  dark  ages  of  creation  in 
which  Life  struggled  to  create  a  being  that 
would  be  able  to  carry  on  her  work  with  in- 
telligence and  power. 

It  is  gradually  becoming  obvious,  even  to 
rational  people,  that  intelligence  without  will, 
on  the  one  hand,  is  just  as  useless  as  will  with- 
out intelligence,  on  the  other.  What  man 
needs  is  a  combination  of  the  two — always  un- 
derstanding intelligence  as  a  knowledge  of  the 
aim  of  life,  and  will  as  the  desire  to  carry  it 
out.  In  Man  and  Superman^  Don  Juan  takes 
quite  a  compassionate  view  of  life,  and  not 
without  reason.  Any  recognition  of  a  waste- 
ful process  brings  something  like  feelings  of 
compassion,  especially  when  the  intention  of 
the  process-wielder  is  imagined  to  be  a  good 
one,  as  must  be  the  case  in  reference  to  life, 
otherwise  we  should  all  go  insane  ;  for  it  is 
quite  possible  to  look  upon  the  universe  as  a 
series  of  remediable  errors  and  remain  sane. 
It  is  possible,  also,  to  be  both  sane  and  in- 

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Bernard  Shaw 

different  to,  or  ignorant  of,  the  purpose  of  life. 
But  it  is  not  possible  to  keep  mentally  balanced 
before  the  awful  idea  of  a  world  irrevocably 
and  eternally  wrong.  Don  Juan,  who  is,  in 
this  reference  at  all  events,  Bernard  Shaw,  is 
quite  sane  in  his  compassionate  admission  of 
the  blundering  of  the  Life-force  ;  and  he  is 
doubly  sane  in  allowing  compassion  to  take 
the  practical  course  of  desiring  to  help  the 
blind  thing  on  its  upward  struggle. 

But  it  must  not  be  imagined  that  there  is 
any  more  piety  in  this  wish  than  the  piety  that 
is  to  be  found  in  desire  as  a  motive  force. 
Don  Juan  has  no  more  desire  to  save  the 
world  for  the  world's  sake  than  the  world  has 
any  desire  to  save  Don  Juan  for  Don  Juan's 
sake.  His  end  is  purely  selfish,  for  he  sees 
nothing  more  in  his  own  desire  for  something 
finer,  than  the  working  of  the  world's  desire 
for  something  better.  "  I  tell  you,"  he  says, 
"  that  as  long  as  I  can  conceive  something 
better  than  myself  I  cannot  be  easy,  unless  I 
am  striving  to  bring  it  into  existence  or  clear- 
ing the  way  for  it.     That  is  the  law  of  my  life. 

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The  Philosopher 

That  is  the  working  within  me  of  Life's  in- 
cessant aspiration  to  higher  organisation, 
wider,  deeper,  intenser  self- consciousness, 
and  clearer  self-understanding." 

This  attitude  is  more  allied  with  primal 
nature  than  with  any  conscious  endeavour  of 
man.  Bernard  Shaw  seems  to  find  a  new 
language  for  nature,  or  rather  a  new  language 
for  the  evolutionary  theory.  He  definitely 
and,  unlike  most  philosophers,  without 
apology,  places  man  in  the  procession  of  life. 
He  treats  man  as  an  animal  having  brains  and 
self-consciousness.  He  considers  him  in  re-^ 
ference  to  will,  and  his  will  in  reference  to  the 
will  of  the  universe.  But  note  that  it  is  in 
reference  and  not  deference  to  it.  For  once 
man  awakens  to  a  lively  sense  of  his  position 
in  the  world  he  must  needs  face  life  purged  of  all 
deference  to  any  other  tradition  than  that  which 
ministers  to  his  needs. |  Shaw  is  such  a  man  :  he 
is  in  revolt  not  only  against  man's  way  of  look- 
ing at  life,  but  against  life's  way  of  treating  man.  | 

And  if  we   face  the  facts  of  life  we  have 
soon  to  admit  that  this  is  the  only  sane  atti- 

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Bernard   Shaw 

tude  to  take.  Man  for  ages  has  been  on  his 
knees.  He  has  been  thanking  his  gods  and 
cringing  before  the  unknown  fates,  as  though, 
on  the  one  hand,  they  had  given  him  a  great 
bounty  at  considerable  sacrifice  to  themselves, 
and,  on  the  other,  as  though  he  could  only 
propitiate  them  by  renouncing  what  little  of 
the  more  or  less  problematical  good  things 
of  life  he  ever  possessed.  He  rarely  imagined 
himself  the  injured  party.  Even  when  this 
happened,  as  in  the  case  of  Schopenhauer,  he 
did  not  imagine  that  life  was  the  remedy,  but 
death.  The  persistence  of  the  will  to  live  in 
the  face  of  the  eternal  and  blind  pain  of  life 
could  only  be  counteracted  by  the  resistance, 
the  negation  of  the  will. 

This,  on  the  face  of  it,  was  a  sounder  and 
braver  view  of  life  than  that  which  looked  to 
salvation  by  atonement  and  vicarious  sacrifice 
— its  active  negation  of  the  will  to  live  was  at 
least  impossible  without  a  supreme  use  of  the 
will  to  power.  If  the  will  to  live  were  to  be 
combated  by  the  will  to  die,  it  was  a  combat 
that   would    have    glorified  and  justified    its 

2IO 


The   Philosopher 

cause.  But  the  acceptance  of  the  will  to  live 
on  no  other  condition  than  that  one  should  be 
rewarded  in  some  other  phase  of  consciousness 
for  all  the  shortcomings  of  this,  presents 
nothing  for  the  future  but  a  dreary  waste  of 
sameness  and  increasing  stupidity.  Such  a 
state  of  things  can,  however,  never  be  com- 
plete. No  matter  how  much  he  may  try  to 
agree  with  God,  or  Life,  or  the  Universal 
Will,  or  whatever  he  may  call  the  Unknown, 
unless  he  knows  what  he  is  doing,  unless  he 
acts  with  a  will  that  can  dominate  the  brain  ; 
until  that  neglected  organ  can  see  at  least  a 
few  steps  ahead,  the  Unknown  will  use  him 
again  and  again,  as  it  has  done  in  the  past,  as 
the  material  of  experiments  of  whose  success 
past  records  do  not  give  us  any  cause  for  en- 
thusiasm. 

Man  has  really  very  little  to  be  "  thankful 
for."  True,  there  is  much  in  the  world  that 
amuses  him,  and  much  that  affords  him,  more 
or  less,  satisfying  occupation.  But,  after  all 
and  behind  all,  there  is  the  fatality  of  ignor- 
ance and  incapacity,   and  their  children  folly 


Bernard  Shaw 

and  waste,  or  worse,  contentment  and  indiffer- 
ence. If  there  is  one  sin  in  the  present  stage 
of  evolution  it  is  contentment.  No  human 
being  can  afford  to  be  contented  ;  and  if  he  be 
so,  his  sin  will  surely  track  him  down.  Our 
poverty-stricken  and  chaotic  consciousness  is 
reflected  in  our  material  affairs — in  our  hope- 
lessly ugly  cities,  in  our  starvation,  and  in  our 
disease.  And  just  as  the  humility  and  con- 
tentment of  the  poor  are  bringing  the  grey 
hairs  of  civilisation  in  sorrow  to  the  grave,  so 
the  contentment  of  man,  in  the  face  of  the 
mystery  of  life  and  the  limits  of  human  power, 
is  reducing  him  to  an  ineffectual  organism 
which  ultimately  must  be  scrapped  by  Nature, 
or  the  Life-force,  as  the  outworn  medium 
of  a  worthless  experiment. 

This  certainly  would  happen  to  man  were  it 
not  for  the  few  intrepid  spirits  who,  from  age 
to  age,  restore  to  the  flagging  spirit  of  the 
races  some  new  energy — a  Shelley,  for  in- 
stance, who  was  by  no  means  the  ineffectual 
angel,  beating  in  the  void  his  luminous  wings 
in    vain,    of    the   circumspect   and    academic 

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The   Philosopher 


mind  of  Matthew  Arnold.  Shelley  beat  his  , 
luminous  wings  in  vain  no  more  than  William 
Blake  did,  nor,  for  the  matter  of  that, 
Ibsen,  or  Nietzsche,  or  Shaw.  For  these,  in 
the  realm  of  religion  and  philosophy,  are  the 
vitalisers  of  mankind.  The  vanity  of  their 
endeavours  is  the  illusion  of  those  who  happen 
to  be  too  near  them.  Bernard  Shaw  is  in  this  v 
line  of  descent.  But  he  is  by  no  means  deriva- 
tive except  in  the  broadest  sense  ;  he  probably 
owes  more  to  Shelley,  Blake,  the  scientists 
Erasmus  Darwin,  and  Lamarck,  than  to 
either  Ibsen  or  Nietzsche,  to  whom  his  philo- 
sophy has  been  frequently  attributed.  Truth 
needs  no  label,  and  it  does  not  matter  whether 
Shaw's  philosophy  is  consciously  derivative  or 
not.  Any  philosophy  that  is  enunciated  in  a 
way  that  can  attract  the  attention  of  thoughtful  K 
people  must  stand  or  fall  on  the  validity  of  its 
thesis,  and  not  on  its  authority.^ 

1  As  an  historical  point,  Shaw  was  as  surely  Ibsenite  in 
his  early  novels  before  he  had  read  Ibsen,  as  he  was  un- 
doubtedly feeling  his  way  to  a  similar  point  of  -view,  which 
years  afterwards  he  discovered  in  Friedrich  Nietzsche.  But 
such  speculations  matter  very  little.     Shaw  is  one  of  those 

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Bernard   Shaw 

The  attitude  of  such  minds  is  always  com- 
plexioned  with  a  certain  insolence  of  bearing. 
They  are  irreverent  of  the  old  gods,  and  are 
the  first  to  laugh  at  the  new.  But  Bernard 
Shaw  comes  not  as  a  god-breaker,  but  rather 
as  a  god-maker.  This  is  where  his  philosophy  .  / 
joins  hands  with  religion.  He  arrives  in  civil- 
isation at  a  moment  when  men  have  no 
longer  any  very  moving  faith  in  a  living  God. 
Jehovah  is  dead,  and  the  God  of  Sundays  is 
dying.  Many  substitutes  have  been  tried  in- 
stead of  them,  but  there  has  been  a  tin-pot 
ring  about  their  voices  which  has  not  stirred 


representatives  of  spiritual  energy  who,  by  stimulating  the 
intelligence  of  their  age,  even  by  the  inverse  process  of 
causing  it  to  resist  them,  actually  save  the  world.  Since  the 
above  was  written,  however,  Shaw  has  himself  lodged  a 
protest  against  the  growing  habit  of  attributing  every  view  he 
utters  "outside  the  range  of  an  ordinary  suburban  church- 
warden "  as  derived  from  Neitzsche,  Strindberg,  Ibsen,  or 
others  ;  and,  in  the  Preface  to  Major  Barbara.,  he  has  given 
the  names  of  some  of  the  actual  authors  who  have  influenced 
him.  It  is  indeed  a  strange  list,  including  Charles  Lever 
(in  an  almost  forgotten  story  entitled,  A  Days  Ride :  A  Life's 
Romance') ;  Captain  Wilson,  author  of  a  metaphysical  system 
called  Comprehensionism ;  Samuel  Butler,  Ernest  Belfort  Bax, 
and  Mr.  Stuart-Glennie. 

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The  Philosopher 

men  either  to  exaltation  or  to  depravity.  It 
has  just  left  them  where  they  were. 

Shaw  comes  as  a  heretic  among  the  children 
of  the  modern  faith  in  convention,  in  prece- 
dent, in  the  institution.  He  does  not  deny 
the  existence  of  their  gods,  for  he  knows  them 
to  be  only  too  real.  Neither  does  he  advise 
their  return  to  a  faith  in  the  gods  that  are  no 
more.  "  Beware  of  the  man  whose  god  is  in 
the  skies,"  he  says,  knowing  quite  well  how, 
since  the  beginning  of  the  record  of  man's 
doings,  the  sky-god  has  been  the  arbiter  of 
a  destiny  which  can  never  lead  aright.  Be- 
cause, until  man  has  become  the  arbiter  of  his 
own  destiny,  he  can  never  realise  the  purpose 
of  the  world. 

It  has  too  readily  been  supposed  that  the 
purpose  of  the  world  is  to  serve  and  perfect 
man  ;  but  Bernard  Shaw  has  consistently  put 
this  conception  on  one  side  in  favour  of  its 
direct  opposite.  So  far  from  the  Life-force 
having  as  its  highest  purpose  the  salvation  of 
man,  he  supposes,  as  we  have  seen,  that  the 
highest  purpose  of  man  is  to  realise  the  trend  ^ 

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Bernard  Shaw 

of  the  Life-force.  And  only  to  the  extent  that 
man  becomes  in  this  way  the  saviour  of  the 
world  is  man  of  value.  Consistently  with  this 
idea  he  views  the  possible  failure  and  extinc- 
tion of  man  with  optimistic  fortitude,  for  he 
knows  that  such  a  contingency  could  only  be 
the  result  of  man's  failure  to  take  the  oppor- 
tunity given  him  of  realising  the  aim  of  the 
world.  But  man  is  not  an  end  in  himself. 
The  Life-force  is  not  spending  itself  in  per- 
fecting so  limited  an  instrument  for  its  pur- 
pose. Man  in  the  natural  course  of  events 
must  be  surpassed  ;  he  is  no  longer  looked 
upon  as  an  end,  but  as  a  means  to  an  end. 
He  is  as  much  a  creature  of  transition  as  any  /' 
species  in  the  order  of  the  universe.  On  this 
conception  Bernard  Shaw  bases  not  only  his 
distinctive  criticism  of  man,  but  his  con- 
structive idea  of  the  Superman. 

It  cannot  be  said  that  Shaw's  philosophy  is 
a  bridge  between  the  ideas  of  man  and  Super- 
man. But  it  is  an  indication  of  the  direction. 
His  critical  aim  is  an  endeavour  to  eradicate 
all  those  tendencies  in  man  that  militate  against 

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The  Philosopher 

Superman.  For  Superman  is  his  conception 
of  the  procession  of  the  species  at  the  point 
when  the  Life-force  shall  have  found  an  effi- 
cient instrument  for  carrying  out  its  purpose. 
And  all  Shaw's  constructive  proposals  are  de- 
signed to  lead  man  towards  Superman,  from 
blind  and  imperfect  subjection  to  conscious 
co-operation  with  the  Life-force. 

Nothing  illustrates  this  better  than  his  con- 
ception of  Duty.  "  Duty,"  he  says,  "  is  what 
one  should  never  do."  Considered  in  the 
light  of  the  rest  of  his  philosophy,  it  will  be 
readily  understood  that  he  does  not  mean  to 
substitute  anarchy  for  duty.  Shaw  is  just  as 
much  opposed  to  social  anarchism  as  nature  is 
to  chaos.  There  is,  indeed,  no  such  thing 
as  anarchy  in  nature,  and  for  the  same  reasons 
there  can  be  no  such  thing  as  anarchy  in  social 
life.  The  Life-force  grows  out  of  order  follow- 
ing upon  right  action.  And  a  proper  con- 
ception of  Shaw's  negation  of  duty  is  impossible 
without  some  idea  of  what  he  would  consider 
right  action. 

His  repudiation  of  duty  makes  it  clear  that 

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Bernard  Shaw 

right  action  is  not  something  following  upon 
authoritative  concepts.  It  does  not  spring 
out  of  "ought"  or  "should."  And,  on  the 
other  hand,  his  negation  of  all  formulas — 
"  The  golden  rule  is  that  there  are  no  golden 
rules  " — makes  for  the  abolition  of  all  arbi- 
trary distinctions  in  such  considerations.  It 
actually  throws  the  source  of  action  upon  the 
individual.  Instead  of  saying  to  man,  as  the 
moralists  did,  "  Do  what  you  ought  to  do,"  he 
says,  "Do  what  you  want  to  do."  It  is  the 
directly  opposite  doctrine  to  that  enunciated 
by  Carlyle.  His  "Do  the  Duty  which  lies 
nearest  thee,  which  thou  knowest  to  be  a 
Duty,"  becomes  "The  repudiation  of  Duty 
is  the  first  step  towards  progress."  For,  as 
Bernard  Shaw  points  out  in  The  Quintessence  of 
Ibsenisniy  **  Duty  arises  at  first,  a  gloomy 
tyrant  out  of  man's  helplessness,  his  self- 
mistrust,  in  a  word,  his  abstract  fear.  He 
personifies  all  that  he  abstractly  fears  as  God, 
and  straightway  becomes  the  slave  of  his  duty 
to  God.  He  imposes  that  slavery  fiercely  on 
his  children,  threatening  them  with  hell,  and 

218 


The  Philosopher 

punishing  them  for  their  attempts  to  be  happy. 
When,  becoming  bolder,  he  ceases  to  fear 
everything,  and  dares  to  love  something,  this 
duty  of  his  to  what  he  fears  evolves  into  a 
sense  of  duty  to  what  he  loves.  Sometimes 
he  again  personifies  what  he  loves  as  God  ; 
and  the  God  of  Wrath  becomes  the  God  of 
Love :  sometimes  he  at  once  becomes  a 
humanitarian,  an  altruist,  acknowledging  only 
his  duty  to  his  neighbour.  This  stage  is  cor- 
relative to  the  rationalist  stage  in  the  evolu- 
tion of  philosophy  and  the  capitalist  phase  in 
the  evolution  of  industry.  But  in  it  the 
emancipated  slave  of  God  falls  under  the 
dominion  of  Society,  which  having  just  reached 
a  phase  in  which  all  the  love  is  ground  out 
of  it  by  the  competitive  struggle  for  money, 
remorselessly  crushes  him  until,  in  due  course 
of  further  growth  of  his  spirit  or  will,  a  sense 
at  last  arises  in  him  of  his  duty  to  himself. 
And  when  this  sense  is  fully  grown,  which  it 
hardly  is  yet,  the  tyranny  of  duty  is  broken  ; 
for  now  man's  God  is  himself ;  and  he  self- 
satisfied  at  last  ceases  to  be  selfish." 


219 


Bernard  Shaw 

Just  as  in  the  past  creeds  and  theologies 
have  been  thrown  overboard,  so  must  suc- 
ceeding generations  establish  their  growth  by- 
repudiating  and  casting  on  one  side  those 
beliefs  and  morals  which  in  their  turn  have 
served  what  purpose  they  ever  had.  Some- 
times they  have  served  no  further  purpose 
than  indicating,  by  the  fact  of  their  existence, 
that  the  course  of  life  is  not  infallibly  pro- 
gressive—  that  the  Life-force  makes  errors, 
and  occasionally  runs  into  a  blind  alley,  from 
which  there  is  no  way  out  but  by  a  return 
along  the  path  traversed,  until  the  vital  thread 
of  life  is  picked  up  again.  And  this  is  just 
what  Bernard  Shaw  advocates.  He  says  in 
effect  that  man  is  an  evolutionary  cul  de  sac — 
that  he  has  progressed  as  far  as  he  can  along 
the  human  track.  He  is  a  link  in  the  chain  of 
evolution  only  in  so  far  as  the  Life-force  has 
found  him  necessary  as  an  experiment,  and  it 
is  false  science  and  false  philosophy  to  legislate 
and  look  upon  man  as  something  final  and 
established.  Yet  just  because  he  is  an  experi- 
ment in  life,  he  is  of  the  procession  moving 

220 


The  Philosopher 

towards  what  is  greater  than  himself.  That  is 
why  it  is  necessary  for  him  to  retrace  his  steps 
towards  the  place  where  he  may  resume  the 
aim  of  life  with  the  added  power  which  has 
come  through  the  experiences  of  his  detour. 
Any  other  view  than  this  were  illusion,  as 
man's  belief  in  the  suspension  of  his  faculties  at 
death  and  their  resumption  afterwards  in  bliss 
or  torment,  according  to  how  much  of  his  life 
has  been  spent  in  deference  to  entirely  human 
concepts  of  a  God  and  a  God's  love  and 
hatred.  Or,  on  the  other  hand,  the  repudia- 
tion of  this  idea  of  man  as  a  transition 
towards  something  that  shall  surpass  man  more 
greatly  even  than  man  surpasses  the  ape,  as 
well  as  that  of  God,  were  rank  pessimism 
whose  logical  end  is  the  negation  of  the  will  to 
live. 

But  the  repudiation  of  the  will  to  live  will 
never  be  popular  even  with  the  best  minds 
because  of  the  limitations  of  our  knowledge 
of  the  life  we  would  destroy.  What  is  Life  ? 
were  as  difficult  a  question  to  answer  as 
Pilate's  *What  is  Truth?'     The  philosophy 

221 


Bernard  Shaw 

of  Bernard  Shaw  is  a  plea  for  more  light  on 
this  subject.  His  theory  of  the  negation  of 
duty  is  but  a  phase  of  his  argument,  a  con- 
venient vantage  point  to  view  the  whole.  At 
the  same  time,  it  is  the  quintessential  word  of 
his  philosophy,  because  in  the  repudiation  of 
duty  we  are  at  once  thrown  back  upon  those 
passions  and  desires  which  it  has  been  the 
whole  aim  of  civilisation  to  keep  in  bond. 
Does  Shaw  advocate  the  loosening  of  these 
bonds — the  freeing  of  the  animal  instincts  ? 
The  answer  to  this  question  is,  that  he  does. 
Bernard  Shaw  actually  teaches  a  doctrine 
which,  in  spite  of  his  no  formula  protestation, 
has  at  least  one  golden  rule — Do  what  you 
want  to  do. 

Such  a  doctrine,  whilst  taking  the  risks  of 
licence,  does  not  necessarily  involve  humanity 
in  one  great  debauch,  as  pious  and  timid 
people  are  fond  of  imagining.  But  even  if  it 
did,  that  would  be  no  argument  against  the 
doctrine ;  for,  providing  we  cannot  have  a 
race  of  men  so  self-powered  as  to  be  able  to 
resist  destructive  desires,  it  were  better  that 

222 


The   Philosopher 


humanity  should  annihilate  itself  as  quickly  as 
possible  in  one  great  orgie.  But  this  would 
be  impossible — it  would  be  nothing  short  of 
a  denial  of  the  will  to  live.  And  the  very 
essence  of  the  doctrine  of  a  desire-directed  life 
is,  that  rather  than  denying  life  it  takes  up 
the  cause  of  life  at  its  most  vital  point — the 
instinctive  and  unconquerable  will  to  live.  To 
do  what  you  want  to  do  is  to  ally  yourself  \  / 
with  the  Life-force. 

The  thing  people  have  to  get  out  of  their 
minds  is  that  desire  is  coincident  with  vice. 
It  is  nothing  of  the  sort.  Vice  is  that  which 
makes  for  the  destruction  of  some  form  of 
life,  and,  like  virtue,  it  is  its  own  reward  ; 
but,  like  virtue  again,  it  has  no  value,  unless  it 
be  the  result  of  personal  choice — of  desire,  in 
short.  Bernard  Shaw  sees  quite  clearly  that 
mere  voluptuousness  can  have  but  one  end — 
the  destruction  of  power.  That  is  seen  daily 
in  the  civilised  form  of  desire  surreptitiously 
expressing  itself  behind  a  moral  code.  Shaw 
has,  indeed,  called  himself  a  Puritan  in  the 
old  sense,  and  he  distinctly  says  that  the  volup- 

223 


Bernard  Shaw 

tuary  will  have  to  be  eliminated  from  the 
evolutionary  process. 

Ever  since  that  incident  occurred  in  life 
which  produced  man  a  battle  has  been  going 
on  between  the  result  of  the  incident — man — 
and  the  probably  unwitting  cause  of  it — 
nature,  alias  the  Life-force.  At  one  point  in 
the  course  of  evolution  the  highest  form  of 
sentient  matter — man — commenced  to  think 
about  itself.  Self-consciousness  was  born. 
The  Life-force  as  exemplified  in  the  mind  of 
man  became  a  mirror  in  which  man  saw  him- 
self. The  vision  pleased  him  so  well  that  he 
has  done  practically  nothing  ever  since  but 
gaze  and  admire.  Man  has  become  an  obses- 
sion. Civilisation,  instead  of  being  an  aid  to 
the  creation  of  new  and  greater  forms  of  life, 
has  simply  been  an  expedient  for  allowing 
humanity  to  live  upon  its  self-reputation. 

From  the  instant  man  became  obsessed  by 
his  own  beauty  and  wisdom  evolution  ceased. 
If  it  had  been  possible  for  the  apes  to  have 
acquired  this  conceit,  evolution  would  have 
ceased  with  them  just  the  same.    Now,  Shaw's 

224 


The   Philosopher 

advocacy  of  a  return  to  the  instinctive  life  is 
the  recognition  that  the  only  genuine  motive 
force  of  life  lies  in  instinct.  So  long  as  the 
instincts  were  followed  life  evolved  higher 
forms.  Man,  by  substituting  duties  for  in- 
stincts, has  actually  sterilised  life's  power  of 
growth — has  thrown  the  Life-force  into  the 
necessity  of  having  to  perpetually  repeat  the 
same  forms  instead  of  creating  new  ones. 

It  is  not,  however,  new  forms  for  the  sake 
of  novelty  that  are  demanded,  but  new  forms 
for  the  sake  of  new  capacity.  The  point  at 
which  the  Life-force  became  ineffectual  was  the 
point  at  which  instinct  was  limited  by  morality. 
Man,  by  attempting  to  suppress  the  world- 
will,  which  is  another  name  for  instinct,  has 
come  nearer  to  the  negation  of  life  than 
any  other  species.  Bernard  Shaw,  recognising 
desire,  instinct,  and  will  to  be  nothing  less 
than  the  Life-force  itself,  advocates  as  boldly 
as  Nietzsche  advocates,  and  with  much  greater 
clearness,  acceptance  of  the  fact.  For  by  this 
means  alone  can  we  hope  for  Superman. 

But  Shaw  and   Nietzsche  have   few  other 

225 


Bernard  Shaw 

resemblances.  Bernard  Shaw's  Superman  is 
quite  a  social  person,  whereas  Nietzsche's  is 
but  an  abstraction — a  great  idea,  but  not  a 
concrete  conception.  There  is  a  benevolence 
in  Shaw  never  found  in  Nietzsche.  Shaw  is 
human,  Nietzsche — superhuman.  That  is  why- 
Shaw  sees  the  Superman  in  Shakespear,  in 
Goethe,  in  Shelley  —  who  are  not,  in  the 
Nietzschean  sense.  Supermen  at  all.  Man, 
according  to  Nietzsche,  will  be  surpassed  :  "  / 
teach  you  Superman.  Man  is  a  something  that 
shall  be  surpassed.  What  have  ye  done  to 
surpass  him  }  All  beings  hitherto  have  created 
something  beyond  themselves  :  and  are  ye 
going  to  be  the  ebb  of  this  great  tide  and 
rather  revert  to  the  animal  than  surpass  man  .'' 
What  with  man  is  the  ape  .''  A  joke  or  a  sore 
shame.  Man  shall  be  the  same  for  Superman, 
a  joke  or  a  sore  shame." 

What  Shaw  calls  Superman,  Nietzsche 
would  rightly  call  man.  Leaving  Shakespear 
out  of  the  question  as  being  too  abstract  for 
our  purpose,  and  taking  Shaw's  other  ex- 
amples  of    the    Superman — Goethe,    Shelley, 

226 


The   Philosopher 

Napoleon,  and  Cromwell — we  find  that,  great 
as  these  men  are,  they  do  not  accord 
very  well  with  the  Nietzschean  conception  of 
Superman.  They  are  powerful  and  great  in 
many  ways — but  human-all-too-human.  They 
would  probably  be  of  Nietzsche's  chosen  order, 
which  must  come  into  existence  before  Super- 
man can  be  born.  Shaw  says  that,  "  Until 
there  is  an  England  in  which  every  man  is 
a  Cromwell,  a  Rome  in  which  every  man  is  a 
Cgesar,  a  Germany  in  which  every  man  is 
a  Luther  plus  a  Goethe,  the  world  will  be  no 
more  improved  by  its  heroes  than  a  Brixton 
villa  is  improved  by  the  pyramid  of  Cheops. 
The  production  of  such  a  nation  is  the  only 
real  change  possible  to  us."  But,  according  to 
Nietzsche,  the  production  of  such  a  nation 
would  be  only  the  preliminary  step  towards 
Superman.  Shaw's  nation  of  Supermen  is  but 
the  realisation  of  the  great  noon  of  Zara- 
thustra,  when  man  stands  in  the  middle  of  his 
course  between  animal  and  Superman  :  it  is  not 
the  actual  day,  but  "  the  way  unto  a  new 
morning." 

227 


Bernard  Shaw 

Shaw's  conception  of  man  aiding  the  Life- 
force  in  the  struggle  towards  a  superhuman 
world,  whatever  form  Superman  may  ulti- 
mately take,  is  Don  Juan's  conception  of 
Heaven  as  a  contemplative  state  in  which  the 
human  being  becomes  conscious  of  itself. 
There  is  something  in  this  idea  closely  allied 
to  the  basis  of  all  religious  aspiration.  Shaw 
seems  to  have  gone  back  not  only  to  the 
Greek  philosophic  concept  "  Know  Thyself," 
but  to  the  still  older  concept  of  divine  im- 
manence. But  he  differentiates  his  own 
philosophy  from  those  of  the  past  when  he 
allies  the  God  within  with  the  Life-force,  and 
the  Life-force  with  Instinct.  It  is  impossible 
to  understand  Shaw  unless  this  is  recognised. 
His  negation  of  ideals  and  formulas  is  part  of 
his  endeavour  towards  the  rehabilitation  of 
the  Life  -  force  as  instinctive  action  which 
formula  has  always  sought  to  either  curb  or 
destroy.  At  the  same  time,  it  must  not  be 
concluded  that,  because  of  this  desire  to  place 
instinct  in  its  true  perspective,  Shaw  would 
advocate  the  wilder  forms  of  action   usually 

228 


The  Philosopher 

associated  in  the  popular  mind  with  instinct. 
His  philosophy,  of  course,  takes  this  risk, 
because  he  knows,  just  as  Nietzsche  knew 
when  he  wished  to  take  up  the  tradition  of 
growth  in  Europe  where  it  was  dropped  by 
the  Greeks  of  the  Periclean  era,  that  evolu- 
tion proceeding  only  out  of  instinct  is  neces- 
sarily a  revolutionary  factor. 

But  just  as  his  theory  of  the  repudiation  of 
institutions  is  consistent  with  social  evolution 
so  his  philosophy  of  no  formula  is  consistent 
with  individual  growth.  The  one  is  the 
corollary  of  the  other.  The  imposition  of 
morals  upon  the  individual  will  at  first  frus- 
trates, then  limits,  and  finally  subjugates  it. 
The  result  is  that  undesirable  state  in  which 
we  find  the  majority  of  civilised  people  to- 
day— a  state  in  which  the  constant  suppression 
of  all  intimations  of  will  has  reduced  the  races 
to  habitual  spiritual  apathy.  This  habit  prac- 
tically amounts  to  a  denial  of  life,  for  we  have 
seen  that  instinct,  will,  and  the  Life-force 
are  synonymous  terms.  The  whole  theory 
of  moral  order  is  an  attempt  to  conserve  the 

p  229 


Bernard  Shaw 

power  of  life,  to  prevent  that  prodigality  of 
creative  instinct  which  in  unordered  nature 
looks  like  waste.  But  man's  attempt  to  im- 
prove upon  this  method  of  the  Life-force  has 
failed,  because  he  has  never  been  certain  of 
what  the  Life-force  wanted.  He  is  only  occa- 
sionally certain  of  what  he  wants  himself, 
especially  in  that  emphatic  way  which  would 
ultimately  result  in  his  getting  it.  Shaw  has 
said  that  what  the  Life-force  is  endeavouring 
to  evolve  for  itself  is  a  brain,  and  man  has 
evidently  had  some  intuition  of  this  ;  for  he 
has  taken  his  brain  so  seriously  that  he  has 
quite  overlooked  its  limitations.  Reason  has 
been  accepted,  just  as  morals  have  been  ac- 
cepted, as  an  end  in  itself.  Once  this  position 
was  taken  it  was  quite  natural  that  the  next 
step  should  have  been  the  negation  of  any- 
thing that  did  not  spring  from  reason,  and  as 
reason  is  not  creative  the  limitation  of  creative- 
ness  followed. 

Shaw,  recognising  the  errors  of  the  age  of 
reason,  advocates  the  era  of  the  will.  Just  as 
we  must  look  upon  the  institutions  as  the  tools 

230 


The   Philosopher 

of  a  generation  to  be  discarded  or  improved 
upon  by  succeeding  generations,  so  must  we 
recognise  that  the  intellect  and  its  methods  of 
expression  are,  in  the  same  way,  means  of  life, 
and  not  ends  in  themselves.  The  desire  of 
the  Life-force  for  brains  should  be  met  by 
man,  not  by  the  indifference  of  reason  eternally 
looking  back  at  itself,  but  by  the  concentration 
of  the  mind  upon  the  blindness  of  life,  urging 
forward  towards  the  light.  This  is  the  con- 
templative attitude  ;  it  is  the  attitude  of  co- 
operation with  life  for  the  sake  of  living,  in 
the  sense  that  living  is  growth,  creation  ;  and 
growth  and  creation  are  power,  wisdom,  joy. 

Generally  speaking,  few  would  disagree  with 
such  a  doctrine.  Probably  all  men  mean  the 
same  thing,  although  it  works  out  differently 
in  practice  :  just  as  all  the  leaves  on  a  tree 
desire  to  be  leaves,  and  all  are  leaves,  but  no 
two  are  alike.  The  differences  are  similar  to 
the  differences  in  the  fibre  of  the  mind  of 
man.  Bernard  Shaw  has  one  great  underlying 
idea  which  will  always  exonerate  him  from 
cynicism,  just  as  his  compassion  with  suffering 

231 


Bernard  Shaw 

beings  exonerates  him  from  the  charge  of 
callous  intellectualism  ;  it  is  his  belief  that  what 
man  wanjs  man  can  get.  This  is  the  highest 
compliment  ever  paid  to  man,  and  is,  properly 
speaking,  the  quintessence  of  Shaw. 

Man  evolves,  just  as  other  species  have 
evolved,  not  by  natural  selection,  but  by  a 
constant  satisfaction  of  his  needs.  Environ- 
ment is  in  a  perpetual  state  of  flux,  being 
modified  and  enhanced  according  to  the  needs 
of  life's  most  powerful  units.  Man,  having  a 
brain  and  the  means  of  contemplating  his  ex- 
periences, and  thereby  transferring  them  from 
the  realm  of  blindly  groping  evolution  to  that 
of  conscious  experiment,  has  greater  power 
for  adapting  materials  to  his  ends  than  any 
other  species.  Therefore,  it  is  the  business  of 
man  to  become  conscious  of  the  aim  of  life  by 
contemplation  and  experiment.  He  must  not 
seek  the  fruits  of  action,  but  action  itself. 
Beauty  and  Happiness  are  by-products.  He 
must  satisfy  his  needs,  and  by  doing  so  he  will 
realise  the  will  of  the  universe.  But  if  this 
great  discipline  of  taking  the  line  of  instinct, 

232 


/ 


The   Philosopher 

which  is  by  no  means  the  line  of  least  re- 
sistance, destroys  the  individual,  nature's  ends 
are  best  served  by  his  destruction.  The  ends 
of  life  are  remote.  That  which  survives  does 
so  only  by  power  and  joy  :  by  action  that  can 
face  all  conflicts  without  resentment  and  all 
consequences  without  regret.  The  Life-force 
only  needs  that  which  can  save  itself — that 
which  can  save  itself  not  by  conserving,  but  by 
spending  itself,  until  light-hearted  and  free, 
the  self  neither  fore-doomed  nor  fore-ordained, 
realising  the  full  purpose  of  life,  makes  that 
purpose  his  own. 


233 


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